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- Louis XIV was the king of France from 1643-1715
- He was referred to as the Sun king.
- Louis had to serve as a soldier during the rebellion in France.
- He brought France to its highest point.

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Louis XIV was known for the palace of versailles. He took to the throne May 14, 1643 at age 4 following his fathers death. He died at the age of 77 from infection. He was also known as the sun king. He had 17 children and 2 wives. Maria Theresa was his first wife and his second was Françoise d'Aubigné, Marquise de Maintenon.

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Louis considered himself to be a direct representative of God who had a divine right to rule over the country with absolute power. This was his justification to not have a chief minister.

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Contents

1. Early Life and Reign of Louis XIV

2. Louis XIV Assumes Control of France

3. The Arts and the Royal Court Under Louis XIV

4. Louis XIV and Foreign Policy

5. Louis XIV and Religion

6. Death of Louis XIV

The reign of France's Louis XIV (1638-1715), known as the Sun King, lasted for 72 years, longer than that of any other known European sovereign. In that time, he transformed the monarchy, ushered in a golden age of art and literature, presided over a dazzling royal court at Versailles, annexed key territories and established his country as the dominant European power. During the final decades of Louis XIV's rule, France was weakened by several lengthy wars that drained its resources and the mass exodus of its Protestant population following the king's revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

Early Life and Reign of Louis XIV

Born on September 5, 1638, to King Louis XIII of France (1601-1643) and his Habsburg queen, Anne of Austria (1601-1666), the future Louis XIV was his parents' first child after 23 years of marriage; in recognition of this apparent miracle, he was christened Louis-Dieudonné, meaning "gift of God." A younger brother, Philippe (1640-1701), followed two years later. When the king died on May 14, 1643, 4-year-old Louis inherited the crown of a fractured, unstable and nearly insolvent France. After orchestrating the annulment of Louis XIII's will, which had appointed a regency council to rule on the young king's behalf, Anne served as sole regent for her son, assisted by her chief minister and close confidant, the Italian-born Cardinal Jules Mazarin (1602-1661).

Did you know? At the Palace of Versailles, aristocrats were expected to compete for the privilege of watching Louis XIV wake up, eat meals and prepare for bed.

During the early years of Louis XIV's reign, Anne and Mazarin introduced policies that further consolidated the monarchy's power, angering nobles and members of the legal aristocracy. Beginning in 1648, their discontent erupted into a civil war known as the Fronde, which forced the royal family to flee Paris and instilled a lifelong fear of rebellion in the young king. Mazarin suppressed the revolt in 1653 and by decade's end had restored internal order and negotiated a peace treaty with Hapsburg Spain, making France a leading European power. The following year, 22-year-old Louis married his first cousin Marie-Thérèse (1638-1683), daughter of King Philip IV of Spain. A diplomatic necessity more than anything else, the union produced six children, of whom only one, Louis (1661-1711), survived to adulthood. (A number of illegitimate offspring resulted from Louis XIV's affairs with a string of official and unofficial mistresses.)
READ MORE: 9 Things You May Not Know About Louis XIV
Louis XIV Assumes Control of France

After Mazarin's death in 1661, Louis XIV broke with tradition and astonished his court by declaring that he would rule without a chief minister. He viewed himself as the direct representative of God, endowed with a divine right to wield the absolute power of the monarchy. To illustrate his status, he chose the sun as his emblem and cultivated the image of an omniscient and infallible "Roi-Soleil" ("Sun King") around whom the entire realm orbited. While some historians question the attribution, Louis is often remembered for the bold and infamous statement "L'État, c'est moi" ("I am the State").

Immediately after assuming control of the government, Louis worked tirelessly to centralize and tighten control of France and its overseas colonies. His finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683), implemented reforms that sharply reduced the deficit and fostered the growth of industry, while his war minister, the Marquis de Louvois (1641-1691), expanded and reorganized the French army. Louis also managed to pacify and disempower the historically rebellious nobles, who had fomented no less than 11 civil wars in four decades, by luring them to his court and habituating them to the opulent lifestyle there.

DeAgostini/Getty Images

The Arts and the Royal Court Under Louis XIV

A hard-working and meticulous ruler who oversaw his programs down to the last detail, Louis XIV nevertheless appreciated art, literature, music, theater and sports. He surrounded himself with some of the greatest artistic and intellectual figures of his time, including the playwright Molière (1622-1673), the painter Charles Le Brun (1619-1690) and the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687). He also appointed himself patron of the Académie Française, the body that regulates the French language, and established various institutes for the arts and sciences.

To accommodate his retinue of newly devoted nobles (and, perhaps, to distance himself from the population of Paris), Louis built several lavish châteaux that depleted the nation's coffers while drawing accusations of extravagance. Most famously, he transformed a royal hunting lodge in Versailles, a village 25 miles southwest of the capital, into one of the largest palaces in the world, officially moving his court and government there in 1682. It was against this awe-inspiring backdrop that Louis tamed the nobility and impressed foreign dignitaries, using entertainment, ceremony and a highly codified system of etiquette to assert his supremacy. Versailles' festive atmosphere dissipated to some extent when Louis came under the influence of the pious and orderly Marquise de Maintenon (1635-1719), who had served as his illegitimate children's governess; the two wed in a private ceremony approximately one year after the death of Queen Marie-Thérèse in 1683.

Louis XIV and Foreign Policy

In 1667 Louis XIV launched the War of Devolution (1667-1668), the first in a series of military conflicts that characterized his aggressive approach to foreign policy, by invading the Spanish Netherlands, which he claimed as his wife's inheritance. Under pressure from the English, Swedish and especially the Dutch, France retreated and returned the region to Spain, gaining only some frontier towns in Flanders. This unsatisfactory outcome led to the Franco-Dutch War (1672-1678), in which France acquired more territory in Flanders as well as the Franche-Comté. Now at the height of his powers and influence, Louis established "chambers of reunion" to annex disputed cities and towns along France's border through quasi-legal means.

France's position as the dominant power on the continent-coupled with a colonial presence that burgeoned under Louis XIV-was perceived as a threat by other European nations, including England, the Holy Roman Empire and Spain. In the late 1680s, responding to yet another spate of expansionist campaigns by Louis' armies, they and several smaller countries formed a coalition known as the Grand Alliance. The ensuing war, fought on both hemispheres, lasted from 1688 to 1697; France emerged with most of its territory intact but its resources severely strained. More disastrous for Louis XIV was the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), in which the aging king defended his grandson Philip V's inheritance of Spain and its empire. The long conflict plunged a famine-ridden France into massive debt, turning public opinion against the crown.

Louis XIV and Religion

It was not only decades of warfare that weakened both France and its monarch during the latter half of Louis XIV's reign. In 1685, the devoutly Catholic king revoked the Edict of Nantes, issued by his grandfather Henry IV in 1598, which had granted freedom of worship and other rights to French Protestants, known as Huguenots. With the Edict of Fontainebleau, Louis ordered the destruction of Protestant churches, the closure of Protestant schools and the expulsion of Protestant clergy. Protestants would be barred from assembling and their marriages would be deemed invalid. Baptism and education in the Catholic faith would be required of all children.

Roughly 1 million Huguenots lived in France at the time, and many were artisans or other types of skilled workers. Although emigration of Protestants was explicitly forbidden by the Edict of Fontainebleau, scores of people-estimates range from 200,000 to 800,000-fled in the decades that followed, settling in England, Switzerland, Germany and the American colonies, among other places. Louis XIV's act of religious zeal-advised, some have suggested, by the Marquise de Maintenon-had cost the country a valuable segment of its labor force while drawing the ire of its Protestant neighbors.

Death of Louis XIV

On September 1, 1715, four days before his 77th birthday, Louis XIV died of gangrene at Versailles. His reign had lasted 72 years, longer than that of any other known European monarch, and left an indelible mark on the culture, history and destiny of France. His 5-year-old great-grandson succeeded him as Louis XV.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Early Life and Reign of Louis XIV Louis XIV Assumes Control of France The Arts and the Royal Court Under Louis XIV Louis XIV and Foreign Policy Louis XIV and Religion Death of Louis XIV The reign of France's Louis XIV (1638-1715), known as the Sun King, lasted for 72 years, longer than that of any other known European sovereign.

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was born september 5, 1638 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye France and died September 1, 1715 in Versailles France. He was the king of France from 1642 to 1715. He was known as the sun king and was the longest reigning French Monarch.

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Although Cardinal Mazarin was the Chief Minister who dominated Louis's reign when he was young, Louis became his own Chief Minister once Mazarin died. He controlled his own government, as he acted through his high state council and a few select ministers.
http://www.louis-xiv.de/index.php?id=31

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Louis XIV, France's Sun King, had the longest reign in European history (1643-1715). During this time he brought absolute monarchy to its height, established a glittering court at Versailles, and fought most of the other European countries in four wars. The early part of his reign (1643-61), while Louis was young, was dominated by the chief minister Cardinal Mazarin. In the middle period (1661-85) Louis reigned personally and innovatively, but the last years of his personal rule (1685-1715) were beset by problems.

Born on Sept. 5, 1638, Louis was the first, regarded as "god-given," child of the long-married Louis XIII and his Habsburg wife, Anne of Austria. He succeeded his father on the throne at the age of four. However, he was also a neglected child, cared for by servants. Once he almost drowned in a pond because no one was watching him. However, his mother, Anne of Austria who caused the neglect, instilled in him a lasting fear of "crimes committed against God". While his mother was regent the great nobles and the judges of the parlement of Paris launched a major but uncoordinated revolt (the Fronde of 1648-53) in reaction to the centralizing policies of Louis XIII's minister Cardinal Richelieu and his successor, Mazarin. The royal family was twice driven out of Paris, and at one point Louis XIV and Anne were held under virtual arrest in the royal palace in Paris. This civil war brought Louis XIV poverty, misfortune, fear, humiliation, cold and hunger. This shaped his character and he would never forgive either Paris, the nobles, or the common people. Cardinal Mazarin was victorious in 1653 and constructed an extraordinary administration for the kingdom.
Mazarin finally suppressed the Fronde and restored internal order. The Peace of Westphalia (1648), which ended the Thirty Years' War, together with the Peace of the Pyrenees (1659), which concluded prolonged warfare with Spain, made France the leading European power. The latter treaty was sealed by Louis XIV's marriage (1660) to Marie Therese (1638-83), the daughter of Philip IV of Spain.

On Mazarin's death in 1661, Louis astounded his court by becoming his own chief minister, thereby ending the long "reign of the cardinal-ministers." A sensational 3-year trial (1661-64) of the powerful and corrupt finance minister Nicolas Fouquet sent the would-be chief minister to prison for life. The king thereafter controlled his own government until his death, acting through his high state council (conseil d'en haut) and a few select ministers, whom he called or dismissed at will. The most famous and powerful of the ministers were Jean Baptiste Colbert in internal affairs and the marquis de Louvois in military matters.
Breaking with tradition, Louis excluded from his council members of his immediate family, great princes, and others of the old military nobility (noblesse d'epee); his reliance on the newer judicial nobility (noblesse de robe) led the duc de Saint-Simon to call this, mistakenly, "the reign of the lowborn bourgeoisie." Local government was increasingly placed under removable intendants.

The early personal reign of Louis was highly successful in both internal and foreign affairs. At home the parlements lost their traditional power to obstruct legislation; the judicial structure was reformed by the codes of civil procedure (1667) and criminal procedure (1669), although the overlapping and confusing laws were left untouched. Urban law enforcement was improved by creation (1667) of the office of lieutenant general of police for Paris, later imitated in other towns. Under Colbert commerce, industry, and overseas colonies were developed by state subsidies, tight control over standards of quality, and high protective tariffs. As controller general of finances, Colbert sharply reduced the annual treasury deficit by economies and more equitable, efficient taxation, although tax exemptions for the nobility, clergy, and some members of the bourgeoisie continued.
Colbert and the king shared the idea of glorifying the monarch and monarchy through the arts. Louis was a discriminating patron of the great literary and artistic figures of France's classical age, including Jean Baptiste Moliere, Charles Le Brun, Louis Le Vau, Jules Mansart, and Jean Baptiste Lully. His state established or developed in rapid succession academies for painting and sculpture (1663), inscriptions (1663), French artists at Rome (1666), and science (1666), followed by the Paris Observatory (1667) and the academies of architecture (1671) and music (1672). The literary Academie Francaise also came under formal royal control in 1671.
Money was lavished on buildings. In Paris the Louvre was essentially completed with the classical colonnade by Claude Perrault. In Versailles, Louis XIII's hunting lodge was transformed into a remarkable palace and park, which were copied by Louis's fellow monarchs across Europe. When the king moved permanently to Versailles in 1682, an elaborate court etiquette was established that had the aristocracy, including former rebel princes, vying to participate in Louis's rising (leve) and retiring (couche). These ceremonies led to the saying that, at a distance, one could tell what was happening at the palace merely by glancing at an almanac and a watch.
In foreign affairs, the young Louis XIV launched the War of Devolution (1667-68) against the Spanish Netherlands, claiming that those provinces had "devolved" by succession to his Spanish wife rather than to her half brother Charles II, who had inherited the Spanish crown. The war brought him some valuable frontier towns in Flanders. Louis turned next against the United Provinces of the Netherlands in the third Anglo-Dutch War (1672-78). The intent this time was to take revenge against Dutch intervention in the previous war and to break Dutch trade. By the Peace of Nijmegen (1678-79) he gained more territory in Flanders, and the formerly Spanish Franche-Comte was added to France's eastern frontier, now fortified by the great siege expert, Sebastien Le Prestre de Vauban. Now at the height of his power, the king set up "courts of reunion" to provide legal pretexts for the annexation of a series of towns along the Franco-German border. More blatantly, he seized both the Alsatian city of Strasbourg and Casale, in northern Italy, in 1681.

The turning point in Louis's reign between the earlier grandeur and the later disasters came after Colbert's death (1683). In 1685 the king took the disastrous step of revoking the Protestant (Huguenot) minority's right to worship by his Edict of Fontainebleau, often called the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Many Huguenots--who constituted an industrious segment of French society--left the country, taking with them considerable capital as well as skills. In addition Louis's display of religious intolerance helped unite the Protestant powers of Europe against the Sun King.
In September 1688, Louis sent French troops into the Palatinate, hoping to disrupt his enemies who had formed the League of Augsburg against him. The 9-year war of the Grand Alliance ensued. France barely held its own against the United Provinces and England, both under William III, as well as Austria, Spain, and minor powers; but the Treaty of Rijswijk (1697) preserved Strasbourg and Louis's "reunion" acquisitions along the Franco-German border.
The aging ruler was almost immediately drawn into the disastrous War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14), in which he defended his grandson Philip V's inheritance of Spain and its empire on the death of Charles II. The genius of the English general the duke of Marlborough and his Austrian counterpart, Eugene of Savoy, was almost too much for the ducs de Villars, Berwick, and Vendome, who were Louis's principal generals. The terrible French winter of 1709 and near fiscal collapse also took their toll. Nonetheless, France rallied. By the Peace of Utrecht France retained most of its earlier conquests, and the Spanish empire was divided between Philip V, who received Spain and its overseas colonies, and Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI, who acquired the Spanish Netherlands and Spain's Italian possessions. Louis was forced to agree that the crowns of France and Spain would remain separate despite the dynastic connection.
During the post-1685 period the once personal monarchy became increasingly bureaucratized. A long and bitter quarrel (1673-93) with the pope was concluded when the king withdrew the French clergy's Four Gallican Articles of 1682, in which they had claimed quasi-independence from the papacy for the French church (see Gallicanism). Reconciliation with the papacy aided Louis's attempt to suppress Jansenism. The Jansenist convents of Port-Royal were closed (1709-10), and in 1713 the pope issued, at Louis's request, the anti-Jansenist bull Unigenitus.
After a series of celebrated liaisons with mistresses, notably Louise de la Valliere and Madame de Montespan, Louis settled down to a more sedate life with Madame de Maintenon, whom he secretly married about 1683. She shared with Louis the grief of lost battles and the successive deaths of all but two of his direct descendants. The two who survived him were his grandson Philip V of Spain and a great-grandson who became Louis XV when the Sun King died on Sept. 1, 1715.

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Louis XIV, France's Sun King, had the longest reign in European history (1643-1715). During this time he brought absolute monarchy to its height, established a glittering court at Versailles, and fought most of the other European countries in four wars. The early part of his reign (1643-61), while Louis was young, was dominated by the chief minister Cardinal Mazarin.

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-Born September 5, 1638
-Died September 1, 1715
-Took rule at age of 4 on May 14, 1643
-Ruled for 72 years

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Versailles.
He transformed a royal hunting lodge, into one of the most extravagant palaces in the world.

https://www.history.com/topics/france/louis-xiv

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Contents

1. Early Life and Reign of Louis XIV

2. Louis XIV Assumes Control of France

3. The Arts and the Royal Court Under Louis XIV

4. Louis XIV and Foreign Policy

5. Louis XIV and Religion

6. Death of Louis XIV

The reign of France's Louis XIV (1638-1715), known as the Sun King, lasted for 72 years, longer than that of any other known European sovereign. In that time, he transformed the monarchy, ushered in a golden age of art and literature, presided over a dazzling royal court at Versailles, annexed key territories and established his country as the dominant European power. During the final decades of Louis XIV's rule, France was weakened by several lengthy wars that drained its resources and the mass exodus of its Protestant population following the king's revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

Early Life and Reign of Louis XIV

Born on September 5, 1638, to King Louis XIII of France (1601-1643) and his Habsburg queen, Anne of Austria (1601-1666), the future Louis XIV was his parents' first child after 23 years of marriage; in recognition of this apparent miracle, he was christened Louis-Dieudonné, meaning "gift of God." A younger brother, Philippe (1640-1701), followed two years later. When the king died on May 14, 1643, 4-year-old Louis inherited the crown of a fractured, unstable and nearly insolvent France. After orchestrating the annulment of Louis XIII's will, which had appointed a regency council to rule on the young king's behalf, Anne served as sole regent for her son, assisted by her chief minister and close confidant, the Italian-born Cardinal Jules Mazarin (1602-1661).

Did you know? At the Palace of Versailles, aristocrats were expected to compete for the privilege of watching Louis XIV wake up, eat meals and prepare for bed.

During the early years of Louis XIV's reign, Anne and Mazarin introduced policies that further consolidated the monarchy's power, angering nobles and members of the legal aristocracy. Beginning in 1648, their discontent erupted into a civil war known as the Fronde, which forced the royal family to flee Paris and instilled a lifelong fear of rebellion in the young king. Mazarin suppressed the revolt in 1653 and by decade's end had restored internal order and negotiated a peace treaty with Hapsburg Spain, making France a leading European power. The following year, 22-year-old Louis married his first cousin Marie-Thérèse (1638-1683), daughter of King Philip IV of Spain. A diplomatic necessity more than anything else, the union produced six children, of whom only one, Louis (1661-1711), survived to adulthood. (A number of illegitimate offspring resulted from Louis XIV's affairs with a string of official and unofficial mistresses.)
READ MORE: 9 Things You May Not Know About Louis XIV
Louis XIV Assumes Control of France

After Mazarin's death in 1661, Louis XIV broke with tradition and astonished his court by declaring that he would rule without a chief minister. He viewed himself as the direct representative of God, endowed with a divine right to wield the absolute power of the monarchy. To illustrate his status, he chose the sun as his emblem and cultivated the image of an omniscient and infallible "Roi-Soleil" ("Sun King") around whom the entire realm orbited. While some historians question the attribution, Louis is often remembered for the bold and infamous statement "L'État, c'est moi" ("I am the State").

Immediately after assuming control of the government, Louis worked tirelessly to centralize and tighten control of France and its overseas colonies. His finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683), implemented reforms that sharply reduced the deficit and fostered the growth of industry, while his war minister, the Marquis de Louvois (1641-1691), expanded and reorganized the French army. Louis also managed to pacify and disempower the historically rebellious nobles, who had fomented no less than 11 civil wars in four decades, by luring them to his court and habituating them to the opulent lifestyle there.

DeAgostini/Getty Images

The Arts and the Royal Court Under Louis XIV

A hard-working and meticulous ruler who oversaw his programs down to the last detail, Louis XIV nevertheless appreciated art, literature, music, theater and sports. He surrounded himself with some of the greatest artistic and intellectual figures of his time, including the playwright Molière (1622-1673), the painter Charles Le Brun (1619-1690) and the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687). He also appointed himself patron of the Académie Française, the body that regulates the French language, and established various institutes for the arts and sciences.

To accommodate his retinue of newly devoted nobles (and, perhaps, to distance himself from the population of Paris), Louis built several lavish châteaux that depleted the nation's coffers while drawing accusations of extravagance. Most famously, he transformed a royal hunting lodge in Versailles, a village 25 miles southwest of the capital, into one of the largest palaces in the world, officially moving his court and government there in 1682. It was against this awe-inspiring backdrop that Louis tamed the nobility and impressed foreign dignitaries, using entertainment, ceremony and a highly codified system of etiquette to assert his supremacy. Versailles' festive atmosphere dissipated to some extent when Louis came under the influence of the pious and orderly Marquise de Maintenon (1635-1719), who had served as his illegitimate children's governess; the two wed in a private ceremony approximately one year after the death of Queen Marie-Thérèse in 1683.

Louis XIV and Foreign Policy

In 1667 Louis XIV launched the War of Devolution (1667-1668), the first in a series of military conflicts that characterized his aggressive approach to foreign policy, by invading the Spanish Netherlands, which he claimed as his wife's inheritance. Under pressure from the English, Swedish and especially the Dutch, France retreated and returned the region to Spain, gaining only some frontier towns in Flanders. This unsatisfactory outcome led to the Franco-Dutch War (1672-1678), in which France acquired more territory in Flanders as well as the Franche-Comté. Now at the height of his powers and influence, Louis established "chambers of reunion" to annex disputed cities and towns along France's border through quasi-legal means.

France's position as the dominant power on the continent-coupled with a colonial presence that burgeoned under Louis XIV-was perceived as a threat by other European nations, including England, the Holy Roman Empire and Spain. In the late 1680s, responding to yet another spate of expansionist campaigns by Louis' armies, they and several smaller countries formed a coalition known as the Grand Alliance. The ensuing war, fought on both hemispheres, lasted from 1688 to 1697; France emerged with most of its territory intact but its resources severely strained. More disastrous for Louis XIV was the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), in which the aging king defended his grandson Philip V's inheritance of Spain and its empire. The long conflict plunged a famine-ridden France into massive debt, turning public opinion against the crown.

Louis XIV and Religion

It was not only decades of warfare that weakened both France and its monarch during the latter half of Louis XIV's reign. In 1685, the devoutly Catholic king revoked the Edict of Nantes, issued by his grandfather Henry IV in 1598, which had granted freedom of worship and other rights to French Protestants, known as Huguenots. With the Edict of Fontainebleau, Louis ordered the destruction of Protestant churches, the closure of Protestant schools and the expulsion of Protestant clergy. Protestants would be barred from assembling and their marriages would be deemed invalid. Baptism and education in the Catholic faith would be required of all children.

Roughly 1 million Huguenots lived in France at the time, and many were artisans or other types of skilled workers. Although emigration of Protestants was explicitly forbidden by the Edict of Fontainebleau, scores of people-estimates range from 200,000 to 800,000-fled in the decades that followed, settling in England, Switzerland, Germany and the American colonies, among other places. Louis XIV's act of religious zeal-advised, some have suggested, by the Marquise de Maintenon-had cost the country a valuable segment of its labor force while drawing the ire of its Protestant neighbors.

Death of Louis XIV

On September 1, 1715, four days before his 77th birthday, Louis XIV died of gangrene at Versailles. His reign had lasted 72 years, longer than that of any other known European monarch, and left an indelible mark on the culture, history and destiny of France. His 5-year-old great-grandson succeeded him as Louis XV.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Early Life and Reign of Louis XIV Louis XIV Assumes Control of France The Arts and the Royal Court Under Louis XIV Louis XIV and Foreign Policy Louis XIV and Religion Death of Louis XIV The reign of France's Louis XIV (1638-1715), known as the Sun King, lasted for 72 years, longer than that of any other known European sovereign.

# data[].attributes.body
- known as the Sun King
- reigned france more than 72 years
- became king when he was around 4/5 years old
- married his first cousin Marie-Therese
- broke tradition by declaring he would rule without a chief
- chose sun as his emblem

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Contents

1. Early Life and Reign of Louis XIV

2. Louis XIV Assumes Control of France

3. The Arts and the Royal Court Under Louis XIV

4. Louis XIV and Foreign Policy

5. Louis XIV and Religion

6. Death of Louis XIV

The reign of France's Louis XIV (1638-1715), known as the Sun King, lasted for 72 years, longer than that of any other known European sovereign. In that time, he transformed the monarchy, ushered in a golden age of art and literature, presided over a dazzling royal court at Versailles, annexed key territories and established his country as the dominant European power. During the final decades of Louis XIV's rule, France was weakened by several lengthy wars that drained its resources and the mass exodus of its Protestant population following the king's revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

Early Life and Reign of Louis XIV

Born on September 5, 1638, to King Louis XIII of France (1601-1643) and his Habsburg queen, Anne of Austria (1601-1666), the future Louis XIV was his parents' first child after 23 years of marriage; in recognition of this apparent miracle, he was christened Louis-Dieudonné, meaning "gift of God." A younger brother, Philippe (1640-1701), followed two years later. When the king died on May 14, 1643, 4-year-old Louis inherited the crown of a fractured, unstable and nearly insolvent France. After orchestrating the annulment of Louis XIII's will, which had appointed a regency council to rule on the young king's behalf, Anne served as sole regent for her son, assisted by her chief minister and close confidant, the Italian-born Cardinal Jules Mazarin (1602-1661).

Did you know? At the Palace of Versailles, aristocrats were expected to compete for the privilege of watching Louis XIV wake up, eat meals and prepare for bed.

During the early years of Louis XIV's reign, Anne and Mazarin introduced policies that further consolidated the monarchy's power, angering nobles and members of the legal aristocracy. Beginning in 1648, their discontent erupted into a civil war known as the Fronde, which forced the royal family to flee Paris and instilled a lifelong fear of rebellion in the young king. Mazarin suppressed the revolt in 1653 and by decade's end had restored internal order and negotiated a peace treaty with Hapsburg Spain, making France a leading European power. The following year, 22-year-old Louis married his first cousin Marie-Thérèse (1638-1683), daughter of King Philip IV of Spain. A diplomatic necessity more than anything else, the union produced six children, of whom only one, Louis (1661-1711), survived to adulthood. (A number of illegitimate offspring resulted from Louis XIV's affairs with a string of official and unofficial mistresses.)
READ MORE: 9 Things You May Not Know About Louis XIV
Louis XIV Assumes Control of France

After Mazarin's death in 1661, Louis XIV broke with tradition and astonished his court by declaring that he would rule without a chief minister. He viewed himself as the direct representative of God, endowed with a divine right to wield the absolute power of the monarchy. To illustrate his status, he chose the sun as his emblem and cultivated the image of an omniscient and infallible "Roi-Soleil" ("Sun King") around whom the entire realm orbited. While some historians question the attribution, Louis is often remembered for the bold and infamous statement "L'État, c'est moi" ("I am the State").

Immediately after assuming control of the government, Louis worked tirelessly to centralize and tighten control of France and its overseas colonies. His finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683), implemented reforms that sharply reduced the deficit and fostered the growth of industry, while his war minister, the Marquis de Louvois (1641-1691), expanded and reorganized the French army. Louis also managed to pacify and disempower the historically rebellious nobles, who had fomented no less than 11 civil wars in four decades, by luring them to his court and habituating them to the opulent lifestyle there.

DeAgostini/Getty Images

The Arts and the Royal Court Under Louis XIV

A hard-working and meticulous ruler who oversaw his programs down to the last detail, Louis XIV nevertheless appreciated art, literature, music, theater and sports. He surrounded himself with some of the greatest artistic and intellectual figures of his time, including the playwright Molière (1622-1673), the painter Charles Le Brun (1619-1690) and the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687). He also appointed himself patron of the Académie Française, the body that regulates the French language, and established various institutes for the arts and sciences.

To accommodate his retinue of newly devoted nobles (and, perhaps, to distance himself from the population of Paris), Louis built several lavish châteaux that depleted the nation's coffers while drawing accusations of extravagance. Most famously, he transformed a royal hunting lodge in Versailles, a village 25 miles southwest of the capital, into one of the largest palaces in the world, officially moving his court and government there in 1682. It was against this awe-inspiring backdrop that Louis tamed the nobility and impressed foreign dignitaries, using entertainment, ceremony and a highly codified system of etiquette to assert his supremacy. Versailles' festive atmosphere dissipated to some extent when Louis came under the influence of the pious and orderly Marquise de Maintenon (1635-1719), who had served as his illegitimate children's governess; the two wed in a private ceremony approximately one year after the death of Queen Marie-Thérèse in 1683.

Louis XIV and Foreign Policy

In 1667 Louis XIV launched the War of Devolution (1667-1668), the first in a series of military conflicts that characterized his aggressive approach to foreign policy, by invading the Spanish Netherlands, which he claimed as his wife's inheritance. Under pressure from the English, Swedish and especially the Dutch, France retreated and returned the region to Spain, gaining only some frontier towns in Flanders. This unsatisfactory outcome led to the Franco-Dutch War (1672-1678), in which France acquired more territory in Flanders as well as the Franche-Comté. Now at the height of his powers and influence, Louis established "chambers of reunion" to annex disputed cities and towns along France's border through quasi-legal means.

France's position as the dominant power on the continent-coupled with a colonial presence that burgeoned under Louis XIV-was perceived as a threat by other European nations, including England, the Holy Roman Empire and Spain. In the late 1680s, responding to yet another spate of expansionist campaigns by Louis' armies, they and several smaller countries formed a coalition known as the Grand Alliance. The ensuing war, fought on both hemispheres, lasted from 1688 to 1697; France emerged with most of its territory intact but its resources severely strained. More disastrous for Louis XIV was the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), in which the aging king defended his grandson Philip V's inheritance of Spain and its empire. The long conflict plunged a famine-ridden France into massive debt, turning public opinion against the crown.

Louis XIV and Religion

It was not only decades of warfare that weakened both France and its monarch during the latter half of Louis XIV's reign. In 1685, the devoutly Catholic king revoked the Edict of Nantes, issued by his grandfather Henry IV in 1598, which had granted freedom of worship and other rights to French Protestants, known as Huguenots. With the Edict of Fontainebleau, Louis ordered the destruction of Protestant churches, the closure of Protestant schools and the expulsion of Protestant clergy. Protestants would be barred from assembling and their marriages would be deemed invalid. Baptism and education in the Catholic faith would be required of all children.

Roughly 1 million Huguenots lived in France at the time, and many were artisans or other types of skilled workers. Although emigration of Protestants was explicitly forbidden by the Edict of Fontainebleau, scores of people-estimates range from 200,000 to 800,000-fled in the decades that followed, settling in England, Switzerland, Germany and the American colonies, among other places. Louis XIV's act of religious zeal-advised, some have suggested, by the Marquise de Maintenon-had cost the country a valuable segment of its labor force while drawing the ire of its Protestant neighbors.

Death of Louis XIV

On September 1, 1715, four days before his 77th birthday, Louis XIV died of gangrene at Versailles. His reign had lasted 72 years, longer than that of any other known European monarch, and left an indelible mark on the culture, history and destiny of France. His 5-year-old great-grandson succeeded him as Louis XV.

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Early Life and Reign of Louis XIV Louis XIV Assumes Control of France The Arts and the Royal Court Under Louis XIV Louis XIV and Foreign Policy Louis XIV and Religion Death of Louis XIV The reign of France's Louis XIV (1638-1715), known as the Sun King, lasted for 72 years, longer than that of any other known European sovereign.

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-Ruled from the place of Versailles
-Took over the throne when he was 4
-Ruled over 19 million subjects
-Died from gangrene (came from a leg infection)
-Ruled from (1643-1715)
-Also known as the sun king
-Symbol of absolute monarchy in the classical age.
-Extended the french eastern border and tried capturing the spanish throne in the Spanish succession of 1710-14 for his grandson.
-Had the largest reign in Europe from 1643 to 1715.

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Louis XIV (born September 5, 1638, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France-died September 1, 1715, Versailles, France) was the king of France (1643-1715) who ruled his country, principally from his great palace at Versailles, during one of its most brilliant periods and who remains the symbol of absolute monarchy of the classical age. Internationally, in a series of wars between 1667 and 1697, he extended France's eastern borders at the expense of the Habsburgs and then, in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14), engaged a hostile European coalition in order to secure the Spanish throne for his grandson.

Early life and marriage

Louis was the son of Louis XIII and his Spanish queen, Anne of Austria. He succeeded his father on May 14, 1643. At the age of four years and eight months, he was, according to the laws of the kingdom, not only the master but the owner of the bodies and property of 19 million subjects. Although he was saluted as "a visible divinity," he was, nonetheless, a neglected child given over to the care of servants. He once narrowly escaped drowning in a pond because no one was watching him. Anne of Austria, who was to blame for this negligence, inspired him with a lasting fear of "crimes committed against God."

Louis was nine years old when the nobles and the Paris Parlement (a powerful law court), driven by hatred of the prime minister Jules Cardinal Mazarin, rose against the crown in 1648. This marked the beginning of the long civil war known as the Fronde, in the course of which Louis suffered poverty, misfortune, fear, humiliation, cold, and hunger. These trials shaped the future character, behaviour, and mode of thought of the young king. He would never forgive either Paris, the nobles, or the common people.

In 1653 Mazarin was victorious over the rebels and then proceeded to construct an extraordinary administrative apparatus with Louis as his pupil. The young king also acquired Mazarin's partiality for the arts, elegance, and display. Although he had been proclaimed of age, the king did not dream of disputing the cardinal's absolute power.

The war begun in 1635 between France and Spain was then entering its last phase. The outcome of the war would transfer European hegemony from the Habsburgs to the Bourbons. A French king had to be a soldier, and so Louis served his apprenticeship on the battlefield.

In 1658 Louis faced the great conflict between love and duty, a familiar one for princes of that period. He struggled with himself for two years over his love for Mazarin's niece, Marie Mancini. He finally submitted to the exigencies of politics and in 1660 married Marie-Thérèse of Austria, daughter of King Philip IV of Spain, in order to ratify peace between their two countries.

The childhood of Louis XIV was at an end, but no one believed him capable of seizing the reins of power. No one suspected his thoughts. He wrote in his Mémoires:

In my heart I prefer fame above all else, even life itself....Love of glory has the same subtleties as the most tender passions....In exercising a totally divine function here on earth, we must appear incapable of turmoils which could debase it.

The young king

Mazarin died on March 9, 1661. The dramatic blow came on March 10. The king informed his astonished ministers that he intended to assume all responsibility for ruling the kingdom. This had not occurred since the reign of Henry IV. It cannot be overemphasized that Louis XIV's action was not in accordance with tradition; his concept of a dictatorship by divine right was his own. In genuine faith, Louis viewed himself as God's representative on earth and considered all disobedience and rebellion to be sinful. From this conviction he gained not only a dangerous feeling of infallibility but also considerable serenity and moderation.

He was backed up first by the great ministers Jean-Baptiste Colbert, marquis de Louvois, and Hugues de Lionne, among whom he fostered dissension, and later by men of lesser capacity. For 54 years Louis devoted himself to his task eight hours a day; not the smallest detail escaped his attention. He wanted to control everything from court etiquette to troop movements, from road building to theological disputes. He succeeded because he faithfully reflected the mood of a France overflowing with youth and vigour and enamoured of grandeur.

Despite the use of pensions and punishments, the monarchy had been unable to subdue the nobles, who had started 11 civil wars in 40 years. Louis lured them to his court, corrupted them with gambling, exhausted them with dissipation, and made their destinies dependent on their capacity to please him. Etiquette became a means of governing. From that time, the nobility ceased to be an important factor in French politics, which in some respects weakened the nation.

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Louis XIV | Facts, Biography, Children, & Death

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Louis XIV, king of France (1643-1715) who ruled his country during one of its most brilliant periods and who remains the symbol of absolute monarchy of the classical age. He extended France's eastern borders at the expense of the Habsburgs and secured the Spanish throne for his grandson.

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He was the longest reigning French Monarch, He became king at age 4, He ruled without a chief minister
https://www.history.com/news/9-things-you-may-not-know-about-louis-xiv

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1. Few monarchs have ruled for longer.

Born in 1638, Louis XIV became king at age 4 following the death of his father, Louis XIII, and remained on the throne for the next 72 years. This marks him as both the longest-reigning French monarch in history and the longest-reigning monarch of any extant European nation.

2. Louis' mother served as his regent.

In his will, Louis XIII arranged for a regency council to rule on his young son's behalf. But his Habsburg wife, Anne of Austria, orchestrated an annulment of the council and took over as sole regent. In that capacity, she and her chief minister, Italian-born Cardinal Jules Mazarin, ran afoul of the country's nobles and judges, who rose up against the crown in a series of rebellions from 1648 to 1653. Mazarin was eventually able to crush the dissenters, but not before Louis XIV suffered numerous perceived humiliations, including twice having to flee Paris. From then on, Louis XIV distrusted not only aristocrats and commoners alike, but also Paris itself.

3. He ruled without a chief minister.

As a young man, Louis XIV largely left the decision-making to Mazarin, his mentor and godfather. But when Mazarin died in 1661, the 22-year-old immediately informed his astonished court that he would henceforth rule without a chief minister-something no French king had done for generations. Though many officials apparently expected him to soon bore of this role, he continued carrying out the routine, monotonous affairs of government for the rest of his life. Sitting in on council meetings, writing letters, reading documents, hosting foreign representatives and planning military strategy, he all the while consolidated power in his own hands.

4. Louis considered himself God's representative on Earth.

Although Louis XIV did not invent the "divine right of kings" doctrine, which held that monarchs derived their authority from God and were therefore entitled to wield absolute power, he was certainly an adherent. He made a particular point of associating himself with the Greek and Roman sun god Apollo, adopting the sun as his emblem and even playing Apollo in a royal ballet. Like many other kings, Louis XIV also claimed to possess miraculous healing powers. On major holidays he went around touching those infected with scrofula (also known as tuberculosis of the neck).

5. He was quite open about his infidelities.

In 1660 Louis XIV married Marie-Thérèse, the daughter of Spain's king, a politically expedient move that cemented peace between the two nations. Yet he also took on a string of mistresses, three of whom gained semi-official status, appearing next to him at church and even going off with him to war. Among other benefits, the first of those three became a duchess, the second received a chateau with 1,200 gardeners, and the third wed Louis XIV in a secret ceremony following the death of the queen. Many of his illegitimate children, meanwhile, were given a proper education and considered part of royal society.

6. He was a religious bigot.

A devout Catholic, Louis XIV believed in the motto, "one king, one law, one faith." To that end, he mercilessly cracked down on the country's Protestants, known as Huguenots, who made up roughly 5 percent of the population. The coup de grâce came in 1685, when, in revoking the nearly century-old Edict of Nantes, he stripped them of all religious and civil liberties. Hundreds of Huguenots who continued practicing their religion were put to death and at least 200,000 others fled France for more tolerant lands.

At around the same time, Louis XIV expelled all Jews from the French West Indies. He even went after other Catholics who didn't adhere to his narrow view of the faith, such as the Jansenists, who believed that humankind was inherently corrupt and that God bestowed salvation arbitrarily. In 1709 he banished the nuns from the movement's main convent and soon after ordered its destruction, all the while lobbying the pope to condemn Jansenism as heretical.

7. He was constantly at war.

Disingenuously claiming the Spanish Netherlands (roughly corresponding to present-day Belgium) as the inheritance of his wife, Louis XIV launched the War of Devolution in 1667. This invasion, along with the Dutch War (1672-1678) and the War of the Reunions (1683-1684), netted him a number of new territories that remain part of France to this day. Yet in aggressively expanding his borders, he attracted the enmity of much of the rest of Europe, which united in a "Grand Alliance" against him during the next two conflicts: the Nine Years' War (1688-1697) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714).

With countless lives lost, disease and famine rampant, the economy in shambles and taxes high, Louis XIV had an apparent change of heart late in life. "Do not follow the bad example that I have set for you," a dying Louis told his heir. "I have often undertaken war too lightly and have sustained it for vanity. Do not imitate me, but be a peaceful prince."

8. Louis owned the Hope Diamond.

As one might expect from the creator of the 700-room Palace of Versailles, Louis XIV knew a thing or two about luxury. One of his prized possessions was an immense diamond, then called the French Blue, which purportedly produced the dazzling illusion of a sun at its center when positioned against a gold background. Stolen during the French Revolution, well after Louis XIV's death, it reemerged in Great Britain years later with a new cut and then bounced around from one owner to another.

Now known as the Hope Diamond, this 45.52-carat stone, arguably the most famous jewel in the world, is housed at the Smithsonian's Natural History Museum in Washington, D.C. Not until 2009, when a lead replica of the French Blue turned up, did experts confirm definitively that the French Blue and the Hope Diamond are one and the same.

9. His successor was France's second-longest-reigning monarch.

In the last few years of his life, Louis XIV suffered through a series of family tragedies. First, in 1711, his son and heir apparent died of smallpox. Then, the following year, measles claimed the lives of a grandson and a great-grandson, as well as a beloved granddaughter-in-law. Two grandsons still remained alive. But one died in the aftermath of a 1714 hunting accident, and the other was forced to renounce the French throne as part of a deal in which he remained ruler of Spain.

Louis XIV was now down to just one potential heir: a sickly great-grandson. Though in desperation he declared that two of his illegitimate sons could become king if his direct line died out, it never came to that. Taking over at age 5, his great-grandson would go on to govern France for the next 59 years as Louis XV.

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9 Things You May Not Know About Louis XIV | HISTORY

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On the anniversary of his death, get the facts on the so-called Sun King.

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He broke tradition when Mazarin, his mother's chief minister, died as he wanted to rule without a chief minister.

https://www.history.com/topics/france/louis-xiv#:~:text=In%20that%20time%2C%20he%20transformed,as%20the%20dominant%20European%20power.

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Early Life of Louis XIV

Born on September 5, 1638, to King Louis XIII of France and his Habsburg queen, Anne of Austria, the future Louis XIV was his parents' first child after 23 years of marriage; in recognition of this apparent miracle, he was christened Louis-Dieudonné, meaning "gift of God."

A younger brother, Philippe, followed two years later. When his father died on May 14, 1643, 4-year-old Louis inherited the crown of a fractured, unstable and nearly insolvent France.

After orchestrating the annulment of Louis XIII's will, which had appointed a regency council to rule on the young king's behalf, Anne served as sole regent for her son, assisted by her chief minister and close confidant, the Italian-born Cardinal Jules Mazarin.

Did you know? At the Palace of Versailles, aristocrats were expected to compete for the privilege of watching Louis XIV wake up, eat meals and prepare for bed.

The Fronde

During the early years of Louis XIV's reign, Anne and Mazarin introduced policies that further consolidated the monarchy's power, angering nobles and members of the legal aristocracy.

Beginning in 1648, their discontent erupted into a civil war known as the Fronde, which forced the royal family to flee Paris and instilled a lifelong fear of rebellion in the young king. Mazarin suppressed the revolt in 1653 and by decade's end had restored internal order and negotiated a peace treaty with Hapsburg Spain, making France a leading European power.

The following year, 22-year-old Louis married his first cousin Marie-Thérèse, daughter of King Philip IV of Spain. A diplomatic necessity more than anything else, the union produced six children, of whom only one, Louis, survived to adulthood. (A number of illegitimate offspring resulted from Louis XIV's affairs with a string of official and unofficial mistresses.)

Sun King

After Mazarin's death in 1661, Louis XIV broke with tradition and astonished his court by declaring that he would rule without a chief minister. He viewed himself as the direct representative of God, endowed with a divine right to wield the absolute power of the monarchy.

To illustrate his status, he chose the sun as his emblem and cultivated the image of an omniscient and infallible "Roi-Soleil" ("Sun King") around whom the entire realm orbited. While some historians question the attribution, Louis is often remembered for the bold and infamous statement "L'État, c'est moi" ("I am the State").

Immediately after assuming control of the government, Louis worked tirelessly to centralize and tighten control of France and its overseas colonies. His finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, implemented reforms that sharply reduced the deficit and fostered the growth of industry, while his war minister, the Marquis de Louvois, expanded and reorganized the French army.

Louis also managed to pacify and disempower the historically rebellious nobles, who had fomented no less than 11 civil wars in four decades, by luring them to his court and habituating them to the opulent lifestyle there.

The Arts and the Royal Court Under Louis XIV

A hard-working and meticulous administrator who oversaw his programs down to the last detail, Louis XIV nevertheless appreciated art, literature, music, theater and sports. He surrounded himself with some of the greatest artistic and intellectual figures of his time, including the playwright Molière, the painter Charles Le Brun and the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully.

He also appointed himself patron of the Académie Française, the body that regulates the French language, and established various institutes for the arts and sciences.

To accommodate his retinue of newly devoted nobles (and, perhaps, to distance himself from the population of Paris), Louis built several lavish châteaux that depleted the nation's coffers while drawing accusations of extravagance.

Versailles

Most famously, he transformed a royal hunting lodge in Versailles, a village 25 miles southwest of the capital, into one of the largest and most extravagant palaces in the world, officially moving his court and government there in 1682.

It was against this awe-inspiring backdrop that Louis tamed the nobility and impressed foreign dignitaries, using entertainment, ceremony and a highly codified system of etiquette to assert his supremacy.

Versailles' festive atmosphere dissipated to some extent when Louis came under the influence of the pious and orderly Marquise de Maintenon, who had served as his illegitimate children's governess; the two wed in a private ceremony approximately one year after the death of Queen Marie-Thérèse in 1683.

Louis XIV and Foreign Policy

In 1667 Louis XIV launched the War of Devolution -the first in a series of military conflicts that characterized his aggressive approach to foreign policy-by invading the Spanish Netherlands, which he claimed as his wife's inheritance. Under pressure from the English, Swedish and especially the Dutch, France retreated and returned the region to Spain, gaining only some frontier towns in Flanders.

This unsatisfactory outcome led to the Franco-Dutch War (1672-1678), in which France acquired more territory in Flanders as well as the Franche-Comté region. Now at the height of his powers and influence, Louis established "chambers of reunion" to annex disputed cities and towns along France's border through quasi-legal means.

France's position as the dominant military and economic power on the continent-coupled with a colonial presence that burgeoned under Louis XIV-was perceived as a threat by other European nations, including England, the Holy Roman Empire and Spain.

War of the Spanish Succession

In the late 1680s, responding to yet another spate of expansionist campaigns by Louis' armies, several powerful countries formed a coalition known as the Grand Alliance. The ensuing war, fought on both hemispheres, lasted from 1688 to 1697; France emerged with most of its territory intact but its resources severely strained.

More disastrous for Louis XIV was the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), in which the aging king defended his grandson Philip V's inheritance of Spain and its empire. The long conflict plunged a famine-ridden France into massive debt, turning public opinion against the crown.

Louis XIV and Religion

It was not only decades of warfare that weakened both France and its monarch during the latter half of Louis XIV's reign. In 1685, the devoutly Catholic king revoked the Edict of Nantes, issued by his grandfather Henry IV in 1598, which had granted freedom of worship and other rights to French Protestants, known as Huguenots.

With the 1685 Edict of Fontainebleau, Louis ordered the destruction of Protestant churches, the closure of Protestant schools and the expulsion of Protestant clergy. Protestants would be barred from assembling and their marriages would be deemed invalid. Baptism and education in the Catholic faith would be required of all children.

Roughly one million Huguenots lived in France at the time, and many were merchants, artisans or other types of skilled workers. Although emigration of Protestants was explicitly forbidden by the Edict of Fontainebleau, thousands of people-estimates range from 200,000 to 800,000-fled in the decades that followed, settling in England, Switzerland, Germany and the American colonies, among other places.

Louis XIV's act of religious zeal-advised, some have suggested, by the Marquise de Maintenon-had cost the country a valuable segment of its labor force while drawing the outrage of its Protestant neighbors.

Death of Louis XIV

On September 1, 1715, four days before his 77th birthday, Louis XIV died of gangrene at Versailles. His reign had lasted 72 years, longer than that of any other known European monarch, and left an indelible mark on the culture, history and destiny of France. His five-year-old great-grandson succeeded him as Louis XV.

Sources

The Edict of Nantes, 1598. Columbia University Core Curriculum.
History. Chateau de Versailles.
The Reign of Louis XIV (1643-1715): An Overview. University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences.
History: Louis XIV (1638-1715). BBC.

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We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

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Louis XIV: Sun King, Spouse & Versailles | HISTORY

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Louis XIV, the Sun King, ruled France for 72 years. He built the opulent palace of Versailles, but his wars and the Edict of Nantes left France drained and weak.

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He married his cousin, Maria Theresa of Spain in 1660. After she had died, he secretly married Madame de Maintenon.

https://en.chateauversailles.fr/discover/history/great-characters/louis-xiv#the-royal-family

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The Royal Family

Acclaimed as "Louis the God-given", arriving as he did after a 23-year wait for an heir, Louis XIV was born in Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1638. Taking the throne at the age of four following the death of his father, King Louis XIII, the young monarch received a thorough education from his mother Anne of Austria and his godfather Cardinal Mazarin. While his mother ruled as regent and Mazarin busied himself with the young king's political training, a civil conflict known as the Fronde broke out (1648-1653). Originating as a dispute between the monarchy and the Parlement de Paris, the rebellion subsequently spread to the aristocracy. The child king felt humiliated by the arrogance of the great lords and physically threatened in the capital. He would never forget this experience.

Louis XIV married his cousin (on both sides) Maria Theresa of Spain, the Spanish Infanta, at Saint-Jean-de-Luz in 1660. Their marriage sealed the reconciliation between France and neighbouring Spain. The royal couple had six children. Only the eldest, Louis de France, known as Le Grand Dauphin, would survive to adulthood. After the death of the queen in 1683, the King secretly married Madame de Maintenon. She was the last in a series of official mistresses which had included Mademoiselle de La Vallière and Madame de Montespan, with whom he had several legitimated children.

From royal residences to the Palace of Versailles

Until the official inauguration of the Palace of Versailles on 6 May 1682, the royal court often changed locations. Louis XIV and his courtiers were based in the Louvre Palace, then the Tuileries, alternating with stints at the Châteaux of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Vincennes, Fontainebleau and the rapidly-growing Versailles. The task of building and decorating the ultimate royal residence was entrusted to artists such as André Le Nôtre, Louis Le Vau, Charles Le Brun and Jules Hardouin-Mansart. In 1678 work began on the Hall of Mirrors, the most potent symbol of the King's absolute power. With enough room to house the whole court, the Palace and its surrounding buildings rapidly became symbols of an age when the nobility were prepared to go to any lengths to be close to the King, who respected the royal tradition whereby the monarch had to be accessible to his courtiers. Under the sovereign's watchful eye, the nobility could no longer plot against the throne; the great lords were kept in their place in the army or at court, eager to serve and please the King. Intimidating, majestic, kept informed by an army of spies, the king controlled everything.

A royal art-lover

The King cultivated a broad variety of interests and excelled in numerous fields, such as music (he played the guitar), dance (performing in ballets), and horse-riding (Louis XIV was an excellent rider). He also loved hunting, promenades, fencing, shows and parlour games, and was a great fan of billiards. He surrounded himself with the leading artists and writers of his day, including Molière, Lully and Racine. At the Palace of Versailles he staged the finest comedies, operas and tragedies and organised spectacular parties.

King by divine right

At the start of his reign, before turning to more political allegories, Louis XIV chose the sun as his personal emblem. The sun is the symbol of Apollo, god of peace and the arts; it is also the star which gives life to all things, rising and setting with unfailing regularity. Like the god, Louis XIV was a warrior fighting to restore peace; he was also a patron of the arts and the source of all privileges. Though the unstinting regularity of his life and with the public getting-up and going-to-bed ceremonies, he hammered home the symbolic parallels. The Palace of Versailles is replete with representations and allegorical allusions to the sun god (laurel wreathes, lyres, tripods) combined with royal portraits and emblems.

An absolute monarchy

As sovereign by divine right, the King was God's representative on earth. It is in this respect that his power was "absolute", which in Latin means literally 'free of all restraints': the king was answerable to no one but God. During his coronation, Louis XIV swore to defend the Catholic faith. To honour this pledge and preserve the religious unity of his kingdom, he cracked down on the Jansenists of Port-Royal and ordered the persecution of Protestants. The previous policy of religious tolerance was abandoned with the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Protestants were forced to convert, and over two hundred thousand fled the country. From his base in Versailles, Louis XIV ruled over a centralised, absolutist state which revolved entirely around him. The King lived in the main wing of the palace, on the first floor, in a suite of three apartments reserved for his use. He applied a strict etiquette at court, a set of rules and protocols by which his noble courtiers were obliged to abide. With the help of Colbert, he oversaw the administrative and financial reorganisation of his realm, and also set up manufactures and worked to boost trade. With Louvois he reformed the army and enjoyed a string of military victories.

After 72 years on the throne, Louis XIV died on 1 September 1715. He was buried in the Saint-Denis Basilica, and the throne passed to his great-grandson Louis XV, aged five.

Louis XIV continues to embody the Grand Siècle, synonymous with the splendour of Versailles and the glory of France.

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The reign of Louis XIV is often referred to as "Le Grand Siècle" (the Great Century), forever associated with the image of an absolute monarch and a strong, centralised state. Coming to the throne at a tender age, tutored by Cardinal Mazarin, the Sun King embodied the principles of absolutism.

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-He grew up during the upheaval of Fronde, which was a system set in place to check the French government
-Relied on a loyal minister known as Mazarin who taught him the ways of kings such as Henri IV which shaped the way he would rule
-https://history.as.uky.edu/reign-louis-xiv-1643-1715-overview

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Born in 1638, Louis XIV succeeded his father, Louis XIII, as king at the age of five. He ruled for 72 years, until his death in 1715, making his reign the longest of any European monarch. By the time he died, he outlived his son and his grandson, leaving the throne to his young great-grandson Louis XV. Louis XIV's reign was important in French history not just because it lasted so long but because he was a strong-willed ruler who was determined to make his subjects obey him and to make his kingdom the predominant power in Europe. He came closer than any other French king to making the political theory of absolutism a reality.

Louis XIV's childhood was marked by the upheaval of the Fronde (1648-1653), which left him with a lasting horror of disorder. The Fronde had shown that the royal judges of the Parlement, the great nobles, the provincial political elites, and the common people could all pose threats to royal authority. Louis XIV would attempt to insure that none of these groups would be able to oppose the central government as they had during the Fronde.

During the early years of his reign, Louis XIV remained dependent on Mazarin, the minister who had loyally served his mother during the Fronde. Mazarin transmitted to Louis XIV the practices that Henri IV, Sully, and Richelieu had developed in the early decades of the seventeenth century. The treaty of the Pyrenees (1659) ended the long war between France and Spain, which had continued even after the settlement of the Thirty Years' War in 1648, on terms favorable to France. France had clearly replaced Spain as Europe's most powerful kingdom.

As an adolescent, Louis XIV threw himself into the social whirl of the court and the pursuit of young women; he did not seem particularly serious about his political responsibilities. When Mazarin died in 1661, everyone expected him to find a new principal minister to take on the burden of actually running the government. To the court's surprise, Louis announced that he intended to be his own principal minister. There would be no equivalent to Sully, Richelieu, or Mazarin for the rest of his reign. Soon after Mazarin's death, Louis had the ambitious finance minister Fouquet, who had hoped to dominate the government, arrested, and his lavish estate confiscated. Impressed by the architect and garden designer who had created Fouquet's palace at Vaux-le-Vicomte, Louis later hired them to create his own palace at Versailles.

Although Louis XIV tried to oversee all aspects of the government, he did rely on ministers for assistance in carrying out his policies. The fate of Fouquet had shown these men, however, that they could not aspire to personal dominance in the style of Richelieu and Mazarin. Louis was careful to divide his favor among competing ministers and encourage rivalries among them, so that he would always be in a position to make the decisions that mattered.

The most important minister in the first half of Louis XIV's reign was Colbert, a former assistant of Mazarin's. Colbert is remembered above all for his efforts to regulate the French economy. He believed that an organized effort was needed to allow France to surpass its rivals, particularly the Netherlands and England. French merchants and manufacturers were strictly regulated to avoid what Colbert regarded as wasteful competition and to make sure that their goods were of high quality. Colbert tried to encourage the development of domestic manufactures to replace goods that France had had to import from abroad, especially expensive luxury products. His mercantilist policies discouraged imports through high tariffs and tried to build up export industries whose sales abroad would increase the amount of money flowing into the kingdom.

Building up France's economy was just one part of Louis XIV's program for increasing the country's power. In his view, the most important duty of a ruler was to seek gloire (glory) for himself and his country through military successes. The war minister, Louvois, was put in charge of organizing an army that soon grew to be Europe's largest. In 1665, Louis XIV launched an attack on the Spanish provinces in the Netherlands, along France's northern borders. This War of Devolution (1666-68) added the important city of Lille to French territory. In 1672, France attacked the Netherlands, an important commercial rival. The French expected an easy victory over their much smaller opponent, but the Dutch succeeded in finding allies and put up a stiff resistance. Although Louis XIV's propagandists proclaimed the war a triumph, in fact it ended in 1678 with only minor gains for France.

At home, Louis XIV continued his efforts to strengthen royal power. He systematized Richelieu's method of controlling the provinces through appointed officials by creating a system of permanent intendants, one for each of the country's provinces. The intendants, who could be moved or dismissed by the king, oversaw the enforcement of laws and the collection of taxes, and reported regularly to the king about events in their province. French subjects became accustomed to the permanent presence of royal authority throughout the country. In 1673, Louis curtailed the powers of the parlements, the royal courts. They were forbidden to protest against the provisions of new laws until after they had registered them. This greatly reduced the courts' ability to obstruct royal policy and influence the population.

Although he was determined to be obeyed, Louis XIV understood that he needed cooperation from his subjects to carry out his policies. He offered the country's noble elites a virtual monopoly on government offices and favors in exchange for their support. In France's towns, elected city councils were replaced with officials named by the king, who could be counted on to give him their loyalty. To raise money, he created and sold an ever-increasing number of venal offices. Louis XIV distrusted the lower classes, viewing them as a potential source of disorder. He created large hopitaux (hospices) where beggars, orphans, criminals and the insane were forcibly locked up under tight supervision.

Like his predecessors Henri IV and Louis XIII, Louis XIV wanted to see France achieve religious unity. Although he was a devout Catholic, he resented the Pope's efforts to control the French Church. In 1682, he imposed the Gallican articles on the French hierarchy, giving the king almost total control over the naming of bishops and the internal affairs of the church. Urged on by militant Catholics who convinced him that the Protestant minority was too weak to resist, Louis decided in 1685 that the time had come to revoke the edict of Nantes. Protestant worship in France was forbidden, and drastic measures, such as quartering troops in Protestant homes, were used to pressure them to convert. About one-third of France's Protestants fled abroad to escape this persecution; others formed an underground movement, holding religious services in forests and remote mountain areas. The Protestant exiles waged a propaganda campaign against Louis XIV from their refuges in the Netherlands and elsewhere, significantly damaging the king's reputation abroad.

Throughout the early 1680s, Louis XIV continued his aggressive drive to expand France's borders, particularly along the Rhine river. The annexation of the historically German city of Strasbourg in 1681 gave him control of the strategic province of Alsace. France's push toward the Rhine brought Louis XIV into conflict with the Austrian Habsburg dynasty, but Emperor Leopold I was distracted by a war against the Ottoman Empire, whose armies threatened his capital of Vienna in 1683. Although the Austrians were fellow Christians, Louis XIV encouraged the Turks, further poisoning relations with the Habsburgs.

Once the Austrians had defeated the Turks, they joined an alliance with France's other enemies. Leadership of this coalition came from the Dutch leader William of Orange, who became king of England in 1688 as William III, replacing James II who Louis XIV had supported. In 1688, France found itself involved in a new round of warfare against an alliance that included all the other major European powers: England, the Netherlands, Austria, and Prussia. Huguenot exiles driven out of France after 1685 waged an effective propaganda campaign against Louis XIV. The war of the League of Augsburg lasted until 1697. The death of the capable war minister Louvois in 1691 deprived Louis of a valuable advisor. Although the French won some major battles, Louis XIV was unable to break up the enemy coalition, and the final peace settlement was a barely disguised defeat for him.

The war of the League of Augsburg left France financially exhausted, and the aging king was not eager to start another conflict. When Charles II, the king of Spain, died without an heir in 1700 and left his throne to a French Bourbon prince, however, Louis found himself in a dilemma. France's enemies refused to accept an arrangement that they feared would some day lead to a union of France and Spain. Louis was unwilling to renounce such a significant gain in France's diplomatic and military position. Negotiations with William III and Leopold I broke down, and in 1701 France again found itself at war with the British, Dutch, and Austrians.

The war of the Spanish Succession (1701-1713) was the largest and costliest European war up to that time. At its height, the French army grew to more than 400,000 men, three times as large as it had been during the Thirty Years' War. The cost of maintaining this huge war effort was crippling. Taxes increased to record levels. The king's effort to increase the capitation, a tax paid by all subjects regardless of their social status, put a strain on the alliance with the nobility that had been the basis of Louis's system. Protestants in the remote southern region of the Cévennes revolted in 1703, starting a guerilla war that became an additional drain on resources. The French army also suffered several major defeats, most notably at the battle of Blenheim in 1704, when the British forces commanded by the Duke of Marlborough won a devastating victory.

The disasters of the war generated increasing criticism of Louis XIV and his heavy-handed absolutist system. Merchants and manufacturers complained about the rules and regulations that hindered their activities. At the court, many high nobles resented their exclusion from any real political role and talked about the necessity of reducing the excessive powers Louis XIV had gathered into his hands. One unhappy noble, the duc de Saint-Simon, documented their complaints in his extensive diaries. His acid portrait of the aging king and his faction-ridden court was published after his and the king's death, and has become both a literary classic and the source of much of our knowledge about French politics and opinion under Louis XIV.

Devout Catholics objected to a church that had become an instrument of political control; some of them joined a dissident Catholic movement, Jansenism, that called for a purer, stricter form of piety. Fearing that the Jansenists would weaken his authority over the church, Louis XIV pressured the Pope to issue a condemnation of their theological doctrines. The Pope's bull, Unigenitus, issued in 1713, only strengthened the Jansenists' determination to resist both Papal and royal authority. The Jansenist controversy would become one of the major divisions in France during the eighteenth century.

French fortunes reached their low point in 1709, following more military defeats. The winter of 1709-1710 was one of the coldest in French history, destroying crops and reducing much of the population to utter misery. Louis XIV was by now ready to make peace, but his enemies kept raising their demands as they saw France's difficulties mounting. Unwilling to accept demands that he regarded as humiliating for himself and dangerous for the country, Louis was driven to take the extraordinary step of appealing directly to his subjects for their support. "I come to ask for your councils and your aid in this encounter that involves your safety," he told them.

Divisions among France's enemies and better fortunes on the battlefield finally made it possible to bring the war to an end in 1713. The Bourbon Philip V remained king of Spain, but renounced any claim to the French throne, and France avoided having to cede territory gained earlier in Louis's reign. The war left France on the verge of bankruptcy, however, and the aged king was deeply unpopular. In the meantime, the death of his son and grandson during the last years of the war had left a young great-grandson as heir, raising the prospect of another troubled regency. Louis XIV's attempt to ensure the survival of the dynasty by making his illegitimate sons eligible for the throne further alienated key court figures. At his death in 1715, Louis XIV left behind a deeply troubled kingdom. His critics hoped that France would now move in the direction of a less centralized government with a less aggressive foreign policy.

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The Reign of Louis XIV (1643-1715): An Overview

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Born in 1638, Louis XIV succeeded his father, Louis XIII, as king at the age of five. He ruled for 72 years, until his death in 1715, making his reign the longest of any European monarch. By the time he died, he outlived his son and his grandson, leaving the throne to his young great-grandson Louis XV.

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Since he ruled for 72 years, he was classified as the longest ruling European monarch compared to others during his time.

https://history.as.uky.edu/reign-louis-xiv-1643-1715-overview

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Born in 1638, Louis XIV succeeded his father, Louis XIII, as king at the age of five. He ruled for 72 years, until his death in 1715, making his reign the longest of any European monarch. By the time he died, he outlived his son and his grandson, leaving the throne to his young great-grandson Louis XV. Louis XIV's reign was important in French history not just because it lasted so long but because he was a strong-willed ruler who was determined to make his subjects obey him and to make his kingdom the predominant power in Europe. He came closer than any other French king to making the political theory of absolutism a reality.

Louis XIV's childhood was marked by the upheaval of the Fronde (1648-1653), which left him with a lasting horror of disorder. The Fronde had shown that the royal judges of the Parlement, the great nobles, the provincial political elites, and the common people could all pose threats to royal authority. Louis XIV would attempt to insure that none of these groups would be able to oppose the central government as they had during the Fronde.

During the early years of his reign, Louis XIV remained dependent on Mazarin, the minister who had loyally served his mother during the Fronde. Mazarin transmitted to Louis XIV the practices that Henri IV, Sully, and Richelieu had developed in the early decades of the seventeenth century. The treaty of the Pyrenees (1659) ended the long war between France and Spain, which had continued even after the settlement of the Thirty Years' War in 1648, on terms favorable to France. France had clearly replaced Spain as Europe's most powerful kingdom.

As an adolescent, Louis XIV threw himself into the social whirl of the court and the pursuit of young women; he did not seem particularly serious about his political responsibilities. When Mazarin died in 1661, everyone expected him to find a new principal minister to take on the burden of actually running the government. To the court's surprise, Louis announced that he intended to be his own principal minister. There would be no equivalent to Sully, Richelieu, or Mazarin for the rest of his reign. Soon after Mazarin's death, Louis had the ambitious finance minister Fouquet, who had hoped to dominate the government, arrested, and his lavish estate confiscated. Impressed by the architect and garden designer who had created Fouquet's palace at Vaux-le-Vicomte, Louis later hired them to create his own palace at Versailles.

Although Louis XIV tried to oversee all aspects of the government, he did rely on ministers for assistance in carrying out his policies. The fate of Fouquet had shown these men, however, that they could not aspire to personal dominance in the style of Richelieu and Mazarin. Louis was careful to divide his favor among competing ministers and encourage rivalries among them, so that he would always be in a position to make the decisions that mattered.

The most important minister in the first half of Louis XIV's reign was Colbert, a former assistant of Mazarin's. Colbert is remembered above all for his efforts to regulate the French economy. He believed that an organized effort was needed to allow France to surpass its rivals, particularly the Netherlands and England. French merchants and manufacturers were strictly regulated to avoid what Colbert regarded as wasteful competition and to make sure that their goods were of high quality. Colbert tried to encourage the development of domestic manufactures to replace goods that France had had to import from abroad, especially expensive luxury products. His mercantilist policies discouraged imports through high tariffs and tried to build up export industries whose sales abroad would increase the amount of money flowing into the kingdom.

Building up France's economy was just one part of Louis XIV's program for increasing the country's power. In his view, the most important duty of a ruler was to seek gloire (glory) for himself and his country through military successes. The war minister, Louvois, was put in charge of organizing an army that soon grew to be Europe's largest. In 1665, Louis XIV launched an attack on the Spanish provinces in the Netherlands, along France's northern borders. This War of Devolution (1666-68) added the important city of Lille to French territory. In 1672, France attacked the Netherlands, an important commercial rival. The French expected an easy victory over their much smaller opponent, but the Dutch succeeded in finding allies and put up a stiff resistance. Although Louis XIV's propagandists proclaimed the war a triumph, in fact it ended in 1678 with only minor gains for France.

At home, Louis XIV continued his efforts to strengthen royal power. He systematized Richelieu's method of controlling the provinces through appointed officials by creating a system of permanent intendants, one for each of the country's provinces. The intendants, who could be moved or dismissed by the king, oversaw the enforcement of laws and the collection of taxes, and reported regularly to the king about events in their province. French subjects became accustomed to the permanent presence of royal authority throughout the country. In 1673, Louis curtailed the powers of the parlements, the royal courts. They were forbidden to protest against the provisions of new laws until after they had registered them. This greatly reduced the courts' ability to obstruct royal policy and influence the population.

Although he was determined to be obeyed, Louis XIV understood that he needed cooperation from his subjects to carry out his policies. He offered the country's noble elites a virtual monopoly on government offices and favors in exchange for their support. In France's towns, elected city councils were replaced with officials named by the king, who could be counted on to give him their loyalty. To raise money, he created and sold an ever-increasing number of venal offices. Louis XIV distrusted the lower classes, viewing them as a potential source of disorder. He created large hopitaux (hospices) where beggars, orphans, criminals and the insane were forcibly locked up under tight supervision.

Like his predecessors Henri IV and Louis XIII, Louis XIV wanted to see France achieve religious unity. Although he was a devout Catholic, he resented the Pope's efforts to control the French Church. In 1682, he imposed the Gallican articles on the French hierarchy, giving the king almost total control over the naming of bishops and the internal affairs of the church. Urged on by militant Catholics who convinced him that the Protestant minority was too weak to resist, Louis decided in 1685 that the time had come to revoke the edict of Nantes. Protestant worship in France was forbidden, and drastic measures, such as quartering troops in Protestant homes, were used to pressure them to convert. About one-third of France's Protestants fled abroad to escape this persecution; others formed an underground movement, holding religious services in forests and remote mountain areas. The Protestant exiles waged a propaganda campaign against Louis XIV from their refuges in the Netherlands and elsewhere, significantly damaging the king's reputation abroad.

Throughout the early 1680s, Louis XIV continued his aggressive drive to expand France's borders, particularly along the Rhine river. The annexation of the historically German city of Strasbourg in 1681 gave him control of the strategic province of Alsace. France's push toward the Rhine brought Louis XIV into conflict with the Austrian Habsburg dynasty, but Emperor Leopold I was distracted by a war against the Ottoman Empire, whose armies threatened his capital of Vienna in 1683. Although the Austrians were fellow Christians, Louis XIV encouraged the Turks, further poisoning relations with the Habsburgs.

Once the Austrians had defeated the Turks, they joined an alliance with France's other enemies. Leadership of this coalition came from the Dutch leader William of Orange, who became king of England in 1688 as William III, replacing James II who Louis XIV had supported. In 1688, France found itself involved in a new round of warfare against an alliance that included all the other major European powers: England, the Netherlands, Austria, and Prussia. Huguenot exiles driven out of France after 1685 waged an effective propaganda campaign against Louis XIV. The war of the League of Augsburg lasted until 1697. The death of the capable war minister Louvois in 1691 deprived Louis of a valuable advisor. Although the French won some major battles, Louis XIV was unable to break up the enemy coalition, and the final peace settlement was a barely disguised defeat for him.

The war of the League of Augsburg left France financially exhausted, and the aging king was not eager to start another conflict. When Charles II, the king of Spain, died without an heir in 1700 and left his throne to a French Bourbon prince, however, Louis found himself in a dilemma. France's enemies refused to accept an arrangement that they feared would some day lead to a union of France and Spain. Louis was unwilling to renounce such a significant gain in France's diplomatic and military position. Negotiations with William III and Leopold I broke down, and in 1701 France again found itself at war with the British, Dutch, and Austrians.

The war of the Spanish Succession (1701-1713) was the largest and costliest European war up to that time. At its height, the French army grew to more than 400,000 men, three times as large as it had been during the Thirty Years' War. The cost of maintaining this huge war effort was crippling. Taxes increased to record levels. The king's effort to increase the capitation, a tax paid by all subjects regardless of their social status, put a strain on the alliance with the nobility that had been the basis of Louis's system. Protestants in the remote southern region of the Cévennes revolted in 1703, starting a guerilla war that became an additional drain on resources. The French army also suffered several major defeats, most notably at the battle of Blenheim in 1704, when the British forces commanded by the Duke of Marlborough won a devastating victory.

The disasters of the war generated increasing criticism of Louis XIV and his heavy-handed absolutist system. Merchants and manufacturers complained about the rules and regulations that hindered their activities. At the court, many high nobles resented their exclusion from any real political role and talked about the necessity of reducing the excessive powers Louis XIV had gathered into his hands. One unhappy noble, the duc de Saint-Simon, documented their complaints in his extensive diaries. His acid portrait of the aging king and his faction-ridden court was published after his and the king's death, and has become both a literary classic and the source of much of our knowledge about French politics and opinion under Louis XIV.

Devout Catholics objected to a church that had become an instrument of political control; some of them joined a dissident Catholic movement, Jansenism, that called for a purer, stricter form of piety. Fearing that the Jansenists would weaken his authority over the church, Louis XIV pressured the Pope to issue a condemnation of their theological doctrines. The Pope's bull, Unigenitus, issued in 1713, only strengthened the Jansenists' determination to resist both Papal and royal authority. The Jansenist controversy would become one of the major divisions in France during the eighteenth century.

French fortunes reached their low point in 1709, following more military defeats. The winter of 1709-1710 was one of the coldest in French history, destroying crops and reducing much of the population to utter misery. Louis XIV was by now ready to make peace, but his enemies kept raising their demands as they saw France's difficulties mounting. Unwilling to accept demands that he regarded as humiliating for himself and dangerous for the country, Louis was driven to take the extraordinary step of appealing directly to his subjects for their support. "I come to ask for your councils and your aid in this encounter that involves your safety," he told them.

Divisions among France's enemies and better fortunes on the battlefield finally made it possible to bring the war to an end in 1713. The Bourbon Philip V remained king of Spain, but renounced any claim to the French throne, and France avoided having to cede territory gained earlier in Louis's reign. The war left France on the verge of bankruptcy, however, and the aged king was deeply unpopular. In the meantime, the death of his son and grandson during the last years of the war had left a young great-grandson as heir, raising the prospect of another troubled regency. Louis XIV's attempt to ensure the survival of the dynasty by making his illegitimate sons eligible for the throne further alienated key court figures. At his death in 1715, Louis XIV left behind a deeply troubled kingdom. His critics hoped that France would now move in the direction of a less centralized government with a less aggressive foreign policy.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Reign of Louis XIV (1643-1715): An Overview

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Born in 1638, Louis XIV succeeded his father, Louis XIII, as king at the age of five. He ruled for 72 years, until his death in 1715, making his reign the longest of any European monarch. By the time he died, he outlived his son and his grandson, leaving the throne to his young great-grandson Louis XV.

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Louis XIV was known as France's Sun King, and had the longest reign in European history from 1643 to 1715. Since Louis XIV became King at only five years old, his reign mostly was dominated by the chief minister Cardinal Mazarin.
https://history.as.uky.edu/reign-louis-xiv-1643-1715-overview

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Born in 1638, Louis XIV succeeded his father, Louis XIII, as king at the age of five. He ruled for 72 years, until his death in 1715, making his reign the longest of any European monarch. By the time he died, he outlived his son and his grandson, leaving the throne to his young great-grandson Louis XV. Louis XIV's reign was important in French history not just because it lasted so long but because he was a strong-willed ruler who was determined to make his subjects obey him and to make his kingdom the predominant power in Europe. He came closer than any other French king to making the political theory of absolutism a reality.

Louis XIV's childhood was marked by the upheaval of the Fronde (1648-1653), which left him with a lasting horror of disorder. The Fronde had shown that the royal judges of the Parlement, the great nobles, the provincial political elites, and the common people could all pose threats to royal authority. Louis XIV would attempt to insure that none of these groups would be able to oppose the central government as they had during the Fronde.

During the early years of his reign, Louis XIV remained dependent on Mazarin, the minister who had loyally served his mother during the Fronde. Mazarin transmitted to Louis XIV the practices that Henri IV, Sully, and Richelieu had developed in the early decades of the seventeenth century. The treaty of the Pyrenees (1659) ended the long war between France and Spain, which had continued even after the settlement of the Thirty Years' War in 1648, on terms favorable to France. France had clearly replaced Spain as Europe's most powerful kingdom.

As an adolescent, Louis XIV threw himself into the social whirl of the court and the pursuit of young women; he did not seem particularly serious about his political responsibilities. When Mazarin died in 1661, everyone expected him to find a new principal minister to take on the burden of actually running the government. To the court's surprise, Louis announced that he intended to be his own principal minister. There would be no equivalent to Sully, Richelieu, or Mazarin for the rest of his reign. Soon after Mazarin's death, Louis had the ambitious finance minister Fouquet, who had hoped to dominate the government, arrested, and his lavish estate confiscated. Impressed by the architect and garden designer who had created Fouquet's palace at Vaux-le-Vicomte, Louis later hired them to create his own palace at Versailles.

Although Louis XIV tried to oversee all aspects of the government, he did rely on ministers for assistance in carrying out his policies. The fate of Fouquet had shown these men, however, that they could not aspire to personal dominance in the style of Richelieu and Mazarin. Louis was careful to divide his favor among competing ministers and encourage rivalries among them, so that he would always be in a position to make the decisions that mattered.

The most important minister in the first half of Louis XIV's reign was Colbert, a former assistant of Mazarin's. Colbert is remembered above all for his efforts to regulate the French economy. He believed that an organized effort was needed to allow France to surpass its rivals, particularly the Netherlands and England. French merchants and manufacturers were strictly regulated to avoid what Colbert regarded as wasteful competition and to make sure that their goods were of high quality. Colbert tried to encourage the development of domestic manufactures to replace goods that France had had to import from abroad, especially expensive luxury products. His mercantilist policies discouraged imports through high tariffs and tried to build up export industries whose sales abroad would increase the amount of money flowing into the kingdom.

Building up France's economy was just one part of Louis XIV's program for increasing the country's power. In his view, the most important duty of a ruler was to seek gloire (glory) for himself and his country through military successes. The war minister, Louvois, was put in charge of organizing an army that soon grew to be Europe's largest. In 1665, Louis XIV launched an attack on the Spanish provinces in the Netherlands, along France's northern borders. This War of Devolution (1666-68) added the important city of Lille to French territory. In 1672, France attacked the Netherlands, an important commercial rival. The French expected an easy victory over their much smaller opponent, but the Dutch succeeded in finding allies and put up a stiff resistance. Although Louis XIV's propagandists proclaimed the war a triumph, in fact it ended in 1678 with only minor gains for France.

At home, Louis XIV continued his efforts to strengthen royal power. He systematized Richelieu's method of controlling the provinces through appointed officials by creating a system of permanent intendants, one for each of the country's provinces. The intendants, who could be moved or dismissed by the king, oversaw the enforcement of laws and the collection of taxes, and reported regularly to the king about events in their province. French subjects became accustomed to the permanent presence of royal authority throughout the country. In 1673, Louis curtailed the powers of the parlements, the royal courts. They were forbidden to protest against the provisions of new laws until after they had registered them. This greatly reduced the courts' ability to obstruct royal policy and influence the population.

Although he was determined to be obeyed, Louis XIV understood that he needed cooperation from his subjects to carry out his policies. He offered the country's noble elites a virtual monopoly on government offices and favors in exchange for their support. In France's towns, elected city councils were replaced with officials named by the king, who could be counted on to give him their loyalty. To raise money, he created and sold an ever-increasing number of venal offices. Louis XIV distrusted the lower classes, viewing them as a potential source of disorder. He created large hopitaux (hospices) where beggars, orphans, criminals and the insane were forcibly locked up under tight supervision.

Like his predecessors Henri IV and Louis XIII, Louis XIV wanted to see France achieve religious unity. Although he was a devout Catholic, he resented the Pope's efforts to control the French Church. In 1682, he imposed the Gallican articles on the French hierarchy, giving the king almost total control over the naming of bishops and the internal affairs of the church. Urged on by militant Catholics who convinced him that the Protestant minority was too weak to resist, Louis decided in 1685 that the time had come to revoke the edict of Nantes. Protestant worship in France was forbidden, and drastic measures, such as quartering troops in Protestant homes, were used to pressure them to convert. About one-third of France's Protestants fled abroad to escape this persecution; others formed an underground movement, holding religious services in forests and remote mountain areas. The Protestant exiles waged a propaganda campaign against Louis XIV from their refuges in the Netherlands and elsewhere, significantly damaging the king's reputation abroad.

Throughout the early 1680s, Louis XIV continued his aggressive drive to expand France's borders, particularly along the Rhine river. The annexation of the historically German city of Strasbourg in 1681 gave him control of the strategic province of Alsace. France's push toward the Rhine brought Louis XIV into conflict with the Austrian Habsburg dynasty, but Emperor Leopold I was distracted by a war against the Ottoman Empire, whose armies threatened his capital of Vienna in 1683. Although the Austrians were fellow Christians, Louis XIV encouraged the Turks, further poisoning relations with the Habsburgs.

Once the Austrians had defeated the Turks, they joined an alliance with France's other enemies. Leadership of this coalition came from the Dutch leader William of Orange, who became king of England in 1688 as William III, replacing James II who Louis XIV had supported. In 1688, France found itself involved in a new round of warfare against an alliance that included all the other major European powers: England, the Netherlands, Austria, and Prussia. Huguenot exiles driven out of France after 1685 waged an effective propaganda campaign against Louis XIV. The war of the League of Augsburg lasted until 1697. The death of the capable war minister Louvois in 1691 deprived Louis of a valuable advisor. Although the French won some major battles, Louis XIV was unable to break up the enemy coalition, and the final peace settlement was a barely disguised defeat for him.

The war of the League of Augsburg left France financially exhausted, and the aging king was not eager to start another conflict. When Charles II, the king of Spain, died without an heir in 1700 and left his throne to a French Bourbon prince, however, Louis found himself in a dilemma. France's enemies refused to accept an arrangement that they feared would some day lead to a union of France and Spain. Louis was unwilling to renounce such a significant gain in France's diplomatic and military position. Negotiations with William III and Leopold I broke down, and in 1701 France again found itself at war with the British, Dutch, and Austrians.

The war of the Spanish Succession (1701-1713) was the largest and costliest European war up to that time. At its height, the French army grew to more than 400,000 men, three times as large as it had been during the Thirty Years' War. The cost of maintaining this huge war effort was crippling. Taxes increased to record levels. The king's effort to increase the capitation, a tax paid by all subjects regardless of their social status, put a strain on the alliance with the nobility that had been the basis of Louis's system. Protestants in the remote southern region of the Cévennes revolted in 1703, starting a guerilla war that became an additional drain on resources. The French army also suffered several major defeats, most notably at the battle of Blenheim in 1704, when the British forces commanded by the Duke of Marlborough won a devastating victory.

The disasters of the war generated increasing criticism of Louis XIV and his heavy-handed absolutist system. Merchants and manufacturers complained about the rules and regulations that hindered their activities. At the court, many high nobles resented their exclusion from any real political role and talked about the necessity of reducing the excessive powers Louis XIV had gathered into his hands. One unhappy noble, the duc de Saint-Simon, documented their complaints in his extensive diaries. His acid portrait of the aging king and his faction-ridden court was published after his and the king's death, and has become both a literary classic and the source of much of our knowledge about French politics and opinion under Louis XIV.

Devout Catholics objected to a church that had become an instrument of political control; some of them joined a dissident Catholic movement, Jansenism, that called for a purer, stricter form of piety. Fearing that the Jansenists would weaken his authority over the church, Louis XIV pressured the Pope to issue a condemnation of their theological doctrines. The Pope's bull, Unigenitus, issued in 1713, only strengthened the Jansenists' determination to resist both Papal and royal authority. The Jansenist controversy would become one of the major divisions in France during the eighteenth century.

French fortunes reached their low point in 1709, following more military defeats. The winter of 1709-1710 was one of the coldest in French history, destroying crops and reducing much of the population to utter misery. Louis XIV was by now ready to make peace, but his enemies kept raising their demands as they saw France's difficulties mounting. Unwilling to accept demands that he regarded as humiliating for himself and dangerous for the country, Louis was driven to take the extraordinary step of appealing directly to his subjects for their support. "I come to ask for your councils and your aid in this encounter that involves your safety," he told them.

Divisions among France's enemies and better fortunes on the battlefield finally made it possible to bring the war to an end in 1713. The Bourbon Philip V remained king of Spain, but renounced any claim to the French throne, and France avoided having to cede territory gained earlier in Louis's reign. The war left France on the verge of bankruptcy, however, and the aged king was deeply unpopular. In the meantime, the death of his son and grandson during the last years of the war had left a young great-grandson as heir, raising the prospect of another troubled regency. Louis XIV's attempt to ensure the survival of the dynasty by making his illegitimate sons eligible for the throne further alienated key court figures. At his death in 1715, Louis XIV left behind a deeply troubled kingdom. His critics hoped that France would now move in the direction of a less centralized government with a less aggressive foreign policy.

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The Reign of Louis XIV (1643-1715): An Overview

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Born in 1638, Louis XIV succeeded his father, Louis XIII, as king at the age of five. He ruled for 72 years, until his death in 1715, making his reign the longest of any European monarch. By the time he died, he outlived his son and his grandson, leaving the throne to his young great-grandson Louis XV.

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His mother Anne, and Mazarin was the regent for him throughout his childhood until he was of age. Their policies strengthened the power of the royals and led to a powerful rebellion, the Fronde that caused Louis to be afraid of rebels for the rest of his life.

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Contents

1. Early Life and Reign of Louis XIV

2. Louis XIV Assumes Control of France

3. The Arts and the Royal Court Under Louis XIV

4. Louis XIV and Foreign Policy

5. Louis XIV and Religion

6. Death of Louis XIV

The reign of France's Louis XIV (1638-1715), known as the Sun King, lasted for 72 years, longer than that of any other known European sovereign. In that time, he transformed the monarchy, ushered in a golden age of art and literature, presided over a dazzling royal court at Versailles, annexed key territories and established his country as the dominant European power. During the final decades of Louis XIV's rule, France was weakened by several lengthy wars that drained its resources and the mass exodus of its Protestant population following the king's revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

Early Life and Reign of Louis XIV

Born on September 5, 1638, to King Louis XIII of France (1601-1643) and his Habsburg queen, Anne of Austria (1601-1666), the future Louis XIV was his parents' first child after 23 years of marriage; in recognition of this apparent miracle, he was christened Louis-Dieudonné, meaning "gift of God." A younger brother, Philippe (1640-1701), followed two years later. When the king died on May 14, 1643, 4-year-old Louis inherited the crown of a fractured, unstable and nearly insolvent France. After orchestrating the annulment of Louis XIII's will, which had appointed a regency council to rule on the young king's behalf, Anne served as sole regent for her son, assisted by her chief minister and close confidant, the Italian-born Cardinal Jules Mazarin (1602-1661).

Did you know? At the Palace of Versailles, aristocrats were expected to compete for the privilege of watching Louis XIV wake up, eat meals and prepare for bed.

During the early years of Louis XIV's reign, Anne and Mazarin introduced policies that further consolidated the monarchy's power, angering nobles and members of the legal aristocracy. Beginning in 1648, their discontent erupted into a civil war known as the Fronde, which forced the royal family to flee Paris and instilled a lifelong fear of rebellion in the young king. Mazarin suppressed the revolt in 1653 and by decade's end had restored internal order and negotiated a peace treaty with Hapsburg Spain, making France a leading European power. The following year, 22-year-old Louis married his first cousin Marie-Thérèse (1638-1683), daughter of King Philip IV of Spain. A diplomatic necessity more than anything else, the union produced six children, of whom only one, Louis (1661-1711), survived to adulthood. (A number of illegitimate offspring resulted from Louis XIV's affairs with a string of official and unofficial mistresses.)
READ MORE: 9 Things You May Not Know About Louis XIV
Louis XIV Assumes Control of France

After Mazarin's death in 1661, Louis XIV broke with tradition and astonished his court by declaring that he would rule without a chief minister. He viewed himself as the direct representative of God, endowed with a divine right to wield the absolute power of the monarchy. To illustrate his status, he chose the sun as his emblem and cultivated the image of an omniscient and infallible "Roi-Soleil" ("Sun King") around whom the entire realm orbited. While some historians question the attribution, Louis is often remembered for the bold and infamous statement "L'État, c'est moi" ("I am the State").

Immediately after assuming control of the government, Louis worked tirelessly to centralize and tighten control of France and its overseas colonies. His finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683), implemented reforms that sharply reduced the deficit and fostered the growth of industry, while his war minister, the Marquis de Louvois (1641-1691), expanded and reorganized the French army. Louis also managed to pacify and disempower the historically rebellious nobles, who had fomented no less than 11 civil wars in four decades, by luring them to his court and habituating them to the opulent lifestyle there.

DeAgostini/Getty Images

The Arts and the Royal Court Under Louis XIV

A hard-working and meticulous ruler who oversaw his programs down to the last detail, Louis XIV nevertheless appreciated art, literature, music, theater and sports. He surrounded himself with some of the greatest artistic and intellectual figures of his time, including the playwright Molière (1622-1673), the painter Charles Le Brun (1619-1690) and the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687). He also appointed himself patron of the Académie Française, the body that regulates the French language, and established various institutes for the arts and sciences.

To accommodate his retinue of newly devoted nobles (and, perhaps, to distance himself from the population of Paris), Louis built several lavish châteaux that depleted the nation's coffers while drawing accusations of extravagance. Most famously, he transformed a royal hunting lodge in Versailles, a village 25 miles southwest of the capital, into one of the largest palaces in the world, officially moving his court and government there in 1682. It was against this awe-inspiring backdrop that Louis tamed the nobility and impressed foreign dignitaries, using entertainment, ceremony and a highly codified system of etiquette to assert his supremacy. Versailles' festive atmosphere dissipated to some extent when Louis came under the influence of the pious and orderly Marquise de Maintenon (1635-1719), who had served as his illegitimate children's governess; the two wed in a private ceremony approximately one year after the death of Queen Marie-Thérèse in 1683.

Louis XIV and Foreign Policy

In 1667 Louis XIV launched the War of Devolution (1667-1668), the first in a series of military conflicts that characterized his aggressive approach to foreign policy, by invading the Spanish Netherlands, which he claimed as his wife's inheritance. Under pressure from the English, Swedish and especially the Dutch, France retreated and returned the region to Spain, gaining only some frontier towns in Flanders. This unsatisfactory outcome led to the Franco-Dutch War (1672-1678), in which France acquired more territory in Flanders as well as the Franche-Comté. Now at the height of his powers and influence, Louis established "chambers of reunion" to annex disputed cities and towns along France's border through quasi-legal means.

France's position as the dominant power on the continent-coupled with a colonial presence that burgeoned under Louis XIV-was perceived as a threat by other European nations, including England, the Holy Roman Empire and Spain. In the late 1680s, responding to yet another spate of expansionist campaigns by Louis' armies, they and several smaller countries formed a coalition known as the Grand Alliance. The ensuing war, fought on both hemispheres, lasted from 1688 to 1697; France emerged with most of its territory intact but its resources severely strained. More disastrous for Louis XIV was the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), in which the aging king defended his grandson Philip V's inheritance of Spain and its empire. The long conflict plunged a famine-ridden France into massive debt, turning public opinion against the crown.

Louis XIV and Religion

It was not only decades of warfare that weakened both France and its monarch during the latter half of Louis XIV's reign. In 1685, the devoutly Catholic king revoked the Edict of Nantes, issued by his grandfather Henry IV in 1598, which had granted freedom of worship and other rights to French Protestants, known as Huguenots. With the Edict of Fontainebleau, Louis ordered the destruction of Protestant churches, the closure of Protestant schools and the expulsion of Protestant clergy. Protestants would be barred from assembling and their marriages would be deemed invalid. Baptism and education in the Catholic faith would be required of all children.

Roughly 1 million Huguenots lived in France at the time, and many were artisans or other types of skilled workers. Although emigration of Protestants was explicitly forbidden by the Edict of Fontainebleau, scores of people-estimates range from 200,000 to 800,000-fled in the decades that followed, settling in England, Switzerland, Germany and the American colonies, among other places. Louis XIV's act of religious zeal-advised, some have suggested, by the Marquise de Maintenon-had cost the country a valuable segment of its labor force while drawing the ire of its Protestant neighbors.

Death of Louis XIV

On September 1, 1715, four days before his 77th birthday, Louis XIV died of gangrene at Versailles. His reign had lasted 72 years, longer than that of any other known European monarch, and left an indelible mark on the culture, history and destiny of France. His 5-year-old great-grandson succeeded him as Louis XV.

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Early Life and Reign of Louis XIV Louis XIV Assumes Control of France The Arts and the Royal Court Under Louis XIV Louis XIV and Foreign Policy Louis XIV and Religion Death of Louis XIV The reign of France's Louis XIV (1638-1715), known as the Sun King, lasted for 72 years, longer than that of any other known European sovereign.

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Louis XIV was the king of France and the time period in which he reigned is referred to as the Great Century.

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In 1667 Louis XIV launched the War of Devolution.

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Created the Palace of Versailles
He was 4 years old when he succeeded his father
Died at 76 from gangrene
Known as the Sun King
Believed in the divine right to rule
Absolute Monarch

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Louis XIV (born September 5, 1638, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France-died September 1, 1715, Versailles, France) was the king of France (1643-1715) who ruled his country, principally from his great palace at Versailles, during one of its most brilliant periods and who remains the symbol of absolute monarchy of the classical age. Internationally, in a series of wars between 1667 and 1697, he extended France's eastern borders at the expense of the Habsburgs and then, in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14), engaged a hostile European coalition in order to secure the Spanish throne for his grandson.

Early life and marriage

Louis was the son of Louis XIII and his Spanish queen, Anne of Austria. He succeeded his father on May 14, 1643. At the age of four years and eight months, he was, according to the laws of the kingdom, not only the master but the owner of the bodies and property of 19 million subjects. Although he was saluted as "a visible divinity," he was, nonetheless, a neglected child given over to the care of servants. He once narrowly escaped drowning in a pond because no one was watching him. Anne of Austria, who was to blame for this negligence, inspired him with a lasting fear of "crimes committed against God."

Louis was nine years old when the nobles and the Paris Parlement (a powerful law court), driven by hatred of the prime minister Jules Cardinal Mazarin, rose against the crown in 1648. This marked the beginning of the long civil war known as the Fronde, in the course of which Louis suffered poverty, misfortune, fear, humiliation, cold, and hunger. These trials shaped the future character, behaviour, and mode of thought of the young king. He would never forgive either Paris, the nobles, or the common people.

In 1653 Mazarin was victorious over the rebels and then proceeded to construct an extraordinary administrative apparatus with Louis as his pupil. The young king also acquired Mazarin's partiality for the arts, elegance, and display. Although he had been proclaimed of age, the king did not dream of disputing the cardinal's absolute power.

The war begun in 1635 between France and Spain was then entering its last phase. The outcome of the war would transfer European hegemony from the Habsburgs to the Bourbons. A French king had to be a soldier, and so Louis served his apprenticeship on the battlefield.

In 1658 Louis faced the great conflict between love and duty, a familiar one for princes of that period. He struggled with himself for two years over his love for Mazarin's niece, Marie Mancini. He finally submitted to the exigencies of politics and in 1660 married Marie-Thérèse of Austria, daughter of King Philip IV of Spain, in order to ratify peace between their two countries.

The childhood of Louis XIV was at an end, but no one believed him capable of seizing the reins of power. No one suspected his thoughts. He wrote in his Mémoires:

In my heart I prefer fame above all else, even life itself....Love of glory has the same subtleties as the most tender passions....In exercising a totally divine function here on earth, we must appear incapable of turmoils which could debase it.

The young king

Mazarin died on March 9, 1661. The dramatic blow came on March 10. The king informed his astonished ministers that he intended to assume all responsibility for ruling the kingdom. This had not occurred since the reign of Henry IV. It cannot be overemphasized that Louis XIV's action was not in accordance with tradition; his concept of a dictatorship by divine right was his own. In genuine faith, Louis viewed himself as God's representative on earth and considered all disobedience and rebellion to be sinful. From this conviction he gained not only a dangerous feeling of infallibility but also considerable serenity and moderation.

He was backed up first by the great ministers Jean-Baptiste Colbert, marquis de Louvois, and Hugues de Lionne, among whom he fostered dissension, and later by men of lesser capacity. For 54 years Louis devoted himself to his task eight hours a day; not the smallest detail escaped his attention. He wanted to control everything from court etiquette to troop movements, from road building to theological disputes. He succeeded because he faithfully reflected the mood of a France overflowing with youth and vigour and enamoured of grandeur.

Despite the use of pensions and punishments, the monarchy had been unable to subdue the nobles, who had started 11 civil wars in 40 years. Louis lured them to his court, corrupted them with gambling, exhausted them with dissipation, and made their destinies dependent on their capacity to please him. Etiquette became a means of governing. From that time, the nobility ceased to be an important factor in French politics, which in some respects weakened the nation.

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Louis XIV | Facts, Biography, Children, & Death

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Louis XIV, king of France (1643-1715) who ruled his country during one of its most brilliant periods and who remains the symbol of absolute monarchy of the classical age. He extended France's eastern borders at the expense of the Habsburgs and secured the Spanish throne for his grandson.

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The name The Sun King comes form Roi-Soleil, who the entire realm orbited around. He would be the center of the place he rules, all attention was on him.

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Early Life of Louis XIV

Born on September 5, 1638, to King Louis XIII of France and his Habsburg queen, Anne of Austria, the future Louis XIV was his parents' first child after 23 years of marriage; in recognition of this apparent miracle, he was christened Louis-Dieudonné, meaning "gift of God."

A younger brother, Philippe, followed two years later. When his father died on May 14, 1643, 4-year-old Louis inherited the crown of a fractured, unstable and nearly insolvent France.

After orchestrating the annulment of Louis XIII's will, which had appointed a regency council to rule on the young king's behalf, Anne served as sole regent for her son, assisted by her chief minister and close confidant, the Italian-born Cardinal Jules Mazarin.

Did you know? At the Palace of Versailles, aristocrats were expected to compete for the privilege of watching Louis XIV wake up, eat meals and prepare for bed.

The Fronde

During the early years of Louis XIV's reign, Anne and Mazarin introduced policies that further consolidated the monarchy's power, angering nobles and members of the legal aristocracy.

Beginning in 1648, their discontent erupted into a civil war known as the Fronde, which forced the royal family to flee Paris and instilled a lifelong fear of rebellion in the young king. Mazarin suppressed the revolt in 1653 and by decade's end had restored internal order and negotiated a peace treaty with Hapsburg Spain, making France a leading European power.

The following year, 22-year-old Louis married his first cousin Marie-Thérèse, daughter of King Philip IV of Spain. A diplomatic necessity more than anything else, the union produced six children, of whom only one, Louis, survived to adulthood. (A number of illegitimate offspring resulted from Louis XIV's affairs with a string of official and unofficial mistresses.)

Sun King

After Mazarin's death in 1661, Louis XIV broke with tradition and astonished his court by declaring that he would rule without a chief minister. He viewed himself as the direct representative of God, endowed with a divine right to wield the absolute power of the monarchy.

To illustrate his status, he chose the sun as his emblem and cultivated the image of an omniscient and infallible "Roi-Soleil" ("Sun King") around whom the entire realm orbited. While some historians question the attribution, Louis is often remembered for the bold and infamous statement "L'État, c'est moi" ("I am the State").

Immediately after assuming control of the government, Louis worked tirelessly to centralize and tighten control of France and its overseas colonies. His finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, implemented reforms that sharply reduced the deficit and fostered the growth of industry, while his war minister, the Marquis de Louvois, expanded and reorganized the French army.

Louis also managed to pacify and disempower the historically rebellious nobles, who had fomented no less than 11 civil wars in four decades, by luring them to his court and habituating them to the opulent lifestyle there.

The Arts and the Royal Court Under Louis XIV

A hard-working and meticulous administrator who oversaw his programs down to the last detail, Louis XIV nevertheless appreciated art, literature, music, theater and sports. He surrounded himself with some of the greatest artistic and intellectual figures of his time, including the playwright Molière, the painter Charles Le Brun and the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully.

He also appointed himself patron of the Académie Française, the body that regulates the French language, and established various institutes for the arts and sciences.

To accommodate his retinue of newly devoted nobles (and, perhaps, to distance himself from the population of Paris), Louis built several lavish châteaux that depleted the nation's coffers while drawing accusations of extravagance.

Versailles

Most famously, he transformed a royal hunting lodge in Versailles, a village 25 miles southwest of the capital, into one of the largest and most extravagant palaces in the world, officially moving his court and government there in 1682.

It was against this awe-inspiring backdrop that Louis tamed the nobility and impressed foreign dignitaries, using entertainment, ceremony and a highly codified system of etiquette to assert his supremacy.

Versailles' festive atmosphere dissipated to some extent when Louis came under the influence of the pious and orderly Marquise de Maintenon, who had served as his illegitimate children's governess; the two wed in a private ceremony approximately one year after the death of Queen Marie-Thérèse in 1683.

Louis XIV and Foreign Policy

In 1667 Louis XIV launched the War of Devolution -the first in a series of military conflicts that characterized his aggressive approach to foreign policy-by invading the Spanish Netherlands, which he claimed as his wife's inheritance. Under pressure from the English, Swedish and especially the Dutch, France retreated and returned the region to Spain, gaining only some frontier towns in Flanders.

This unsatisfactory outcome led to the Franco-Dutch War (1672-1678), in which France acquired more territory in Flanders as well as the Franche-Comté region. Now at the height of his powers and influence, Louis established "chambers of reunion" to annex disputed cities and towns along France's border through quasi-legal means.

France's position as the dominant military and economic power on the continent-coupled with a colonial presence that burgeoned under Louis XIV-was perceived as a threat by other European nations, including England, the Holy Roman Empire and Spain.

War of the Spanish Succession

In the late 1680s, responding to yet another spate of expansionist campaigns by Louis' armies, several powerful countries formed a coalition known as the Grand Alliance. The ensuing war, fought on both hemispheres, lasted from 1688 to 1697; France emerged with most of its territory intact but its resources severely strained.

More disastrous for Louis XIV was the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), in which the aging king defended his grandson Philip V's inheritance of Spain and its empire. The long conflict plunged a famine-ridden France into massive debt, turning public opinion against the crown.

Louis XIV and Religion

It was not only decades of warfare that weakened both France and its monarch during the latter half of Louis XIV's reign. In 1685, the devoutly Catholic king revoked the Edict of Nantes, issued by his grandfather Henry IV in 1598, which had granted freedom of worship and other rights to French Protestants, known as Huguenots.

With the 1685 Edict of Fontainebleau, Louis ordered the destruction of Protestant churches, the closure of Protestant schools and the expulsion of Protestant clergy. Protestants would be barred from assembling and their marriages would be deemed invalid. Baptism and education in the Catholic faith would be required of all children.

Roughly one million Huguenots lived in France at the time, and many were merchants, artisans or other types of skilled workers. Although emigration of Protestants was explicitly forbidden by the Edict of Fontainebleau, thousands of people-estimates range from 200,000 to 800,000-fled in the decades that followed, settling in England, Switzerland, Germany and the American colonies, among other places.

Louis XIV's act of religious zeal-advised, some have suggested, by the Marquise de Maintenon-had cost the country a valuable segment of its labor force while drawing the outrage of its Protestant neighbors.

Death of Louis XIV

On September 1, 1715, four days before his 77th birthday, Louis XIV died of gangrene at Versailles. His reign had lasted 72 years, longer than that of any other known European monarch, and left an indelible mark on the culture, history and destiny of France. His five-year-old great-grandson succeeded him as Louis XV.

Sources

The Edict of Nantes, 1598. Columbia University Core Curriculum.
History. Chateau de Versailles.
The Reign of Louis XIV (1643-1715): An Overview. University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences.
History: Louis XIV (1638-1715). BBC.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

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Louis XIV: Sun King, Spouse & Versailles | HISTORY

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Louis XIV, the Sun King, ruled France for 72 years. He built the opulent palace of Versailles, but his wars and the Edict of Nantes left France drained and weak.

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He was the closest out of past French kings to actually turning the nation into an absolutism country.

https://history.as.uky.edu/reign-louis-xiv-1643-1715-overview

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Born in 1638, Louis XIV succeeded his father, Louis XIII, as king at the age of five. He ruled for 72 years, until his death in 1715, making his reign the longest of any European monarch. By the time he died, he outlived his son and his grandson, leaving the throne to his young great-grandson Louis XV. Louis XIV's reign was important in French history not just because it lasted so long but because he was a strong-willed ruler who was determined to make his subjects obey him and to make his kingdom the predominant power in Europe. He came closer than any other French king to making the political theory of absolutism a reality.

Louis XIV's childhood was marked by the upheaval of the Fronde (1648-1653), which left him with a lasting horror of disorder. The Fronde had shown that the royal judges of the Parlement, the great nobles, the provincial political elites, and the common people could all pose threats to royal authority. Louis XIV would attempt to insure that none of these groups would be able to oppose the central government as they had during the Fronde.

During the early years of his reign, Louis XIV remained dependent on Mazarin, the minister who had loyally served his mother during the Fronde. Mazarin transmitted to Louis XIV the practices that Henri IV, Sully, and Richelieu had developed in the early decades of the seventeenth century. The treaty of the Pyrenees (1659) ended the long war between France and Spain, which had continued even after the settlement of the Thirty Years' War in 1648, on terms favorable to France. France had clearly replaced Spain as Europe's most powerful kingdom.

As an adolescent, Louis XIV threw himself into the social whirl of the court and the pursuit of young women; he did not seem particularly serious about his political responsibilities. When Mazarin died in 1661, everyone expected him to find a new principal minister to take on the burden of actually running the government. To the court's surprise, Louis announced that he intended to be his own principal minister. There would be no equivalent to Sully, Richelieu, or Mazarin for the rest of his reign. Soon after Mazarin's death, Louis had the ambitious finance minister Fouquet, who had hoped to dominate the government, arrested, and his lavish estate confiscated. Impressed by the architect and garden designer who had created Fouquet's palace at Vaux-le-Vicomte, Louis later hired them to create his own palace at Versailles.

Although Louis XIV tried to oversee all aspects of the government, he did rely on ministers for assistance in carrying out his policies. The fate of Fouquet had shown these men, however, that they could not aspire to personal dominance in the style of Richelieu and Mazarin. Louis was careful to divide his favor among competing ministers and encourage rivalries among them, so that he would always be in a position to make the decisions that mattered.

The most important minister in the first half of Louis XIV's reign was Colbert, a former assistant of Mazarin's. Colbert is remembered above all for his efforts to regulate the French economy. He believed that an organized effort was needed to allow France to surpass its rivals, particularly the Netherlands and England. French merchants and manufacturers were strictly regulated to avoid what Colbert regarded as wasteful competition and to make sure that their goods were of high quality. Colbert tried to encourage the development of domestic manufactures to replace goods that France had had to import from abroad, especially expensive luxury products. His mercantilist policies discouraged imports through high tariffs and tried to build up export industries whose sales abroad would increase the amount of money flowing into the kingdom.

Building up France's economy was just one part of Louis XIV's program for increasing the country's power. In his view, the most important duty of a ruler was to seek gloire (glory) for himself and his country through military successes. The war minister, Louvois, was put in charge of organizing an army that soon grew to be Europe's largest. In 1665, Louis XIV launched an attack on the Spanish provinces in the Netherlands, along France's northern borders. This War of Devolution (1666-68) added the important city of Lille to French territory. In 1672, France attacked the Netherlands, an important commercial rival. The French expected an easy victory over their much smaller opponent, but the Dutch succeeded in finding allies and put up a stiff resistance. Although Louis XIV's propagandists proclaimed the war a triumph, in fact it ended in 1678 with only minor gains for France.

At home, Louis XIV continued his efforts to strengthen royal power. He systematized Richelieu's method of controlling the provinces through appointed officials by creating a system of permanent intendants, one for each of the country's provinces. The intendants, who could be moved or dismissed by the king, oversaw the enforcement of laws and the collection of taxes, and reported regularly to the king about events in their province. French subjects became accustomed to the permanent presence of royal authority throughout the country. In 1673, Louis curtailed the powers of the parlements, the royal courts. They were forbidden to protest against the provisions of new laws until after they had registered them. This greatly reduced the courts' ability to obstruct royal policy and influence the population.

Although he was determined to be obeyed, Louis XIV understood that he needed cooperation from his subjects to carry out his policies. He offered the country's noble elites a virtual monopoly on government offices and favors in exchange for their support. In France's towns, elected city councils were replaced with officials named by the king, who could be counted on to give him their loyalty. To raise money, he created and sold an ever-increasing number of venal offices. Louis XIV distrusted the lower classes, viewing them as a potential source of disorder. He created large hopitaux (hospices) where beggars, orphans, criminals and the insane were forcibly locked up under tight supervision.

Like his predecessors Henri IV and Louis XIII, Louis XIV wanted to see France achieve religious unity. Although he was a devout Catholic, he resented the Pope's efforts to control the French Church. In 1682, he imposed the Gallican articles on the French hierarchy, giving the king almost total control over the naming of bishops and the internal affairs of the church. Urged on by militant Catholics who convinced him that the Protestant minority was too weak to resist, Louis decided in 1685 that the time had come to revoke the edict of Nantes. Protestant worship in France was forbidden, and drastic measures, such as quartering troops in Protestant homes, were used to pressure them to convert. About one-third of France's Protestants fled abroad to escape this persecution; others formed an underground movement, holding religious services in forests and remote mountain areas. The Protestant exiles waged a propaganda campaign against Louis XIV from their refuges in the Netherlands and elsewhere, significantly damaging the king's reputation abroad.

Throughout the early 1680s, Louis XIV continued his aggressive drive to expand France's borders, particularly along the Rhine river. The annexation of the historically German city of Strasbourg in 1681 gave him control of the strategic province of Alsace. France's push toward the Rhine brought Louis XIV into conflict with the Austrian Habsburg dynasty, but Emperor Leopold I was distracted by a war against the Ottoman Empire, whose armies threatened his capital of Vienna in 1683. Although the Austrians were fellow Christians, Louis XIV encouraged the Turks, further poisoning relations with the Habsburgs.

Once the Austrians had defeated the Turks, they joined an alliance with France's other enemies. Leadership of this coalition came from the Dutch leader William of Orange, who became king of England in 1688 as William III, replacing James II who Louis XIV had supported. In 1688, France found itself involved in a new round of warfare against an alliance that included all the other major European powers: England, the Netherlands, Austria, and Prussia. Huguenot exiles driven out of France after 1685 waged an effective propaganda campaign against Louis XIV. The war of the League of Augsburg lasted until 1697. The death of the capable war minister Louvois in 1691 deprived Louis of a valuable advisor. Although the French won some major battles, Louis XIV was unable to break up the enemy coalition, and the final peace settlement was a barely disguised defeat for him.

The war of the League of Augsburg left France financially exhausted, and the aging king was not eager to start another conflict. When Charles II, the king of Spain, died without an heir in 1700 and left his throne to a French Bourbon prince, however, Louis found himself in a dilemma. France's enemies refused to accept an arrangement that they feared would some day lead to a union of France and Spain. Louis was unwilling to renounce such a significant gain in France's diplomatic and military position. Negotiations with William III and Leopold I broke down, and in 1701 France again found itself at war with the British, Dutch, and Austrians.

The war of the Spanish Succession (1701-1713) was the largest and costliest European war up to that time. At its height, the French army grew to more than 400,000 men, three times as large as it had been during the Thirty Years' War. The cost of maintaining this huge war effort was crippling. Taxes increased to record levels. The king's effort to increase the capitation, a tax paid by all subjects regardless of their social status, put a strain on the alliance with the nobility that had been the basis of Louis's system. Protestants in the remote southern region of the Cévennes revolted in 1703, starting a guerilla war that became an additional drain on resources. The French army also suffered several major defeats, most notably at the battle of Blenheim in 1704, when the British forces commanded by the Duke of Marlborough won a devastating victory.

The disasters of the war generated increasing criticism of Louis XIV and his heavy-handed absolutist system. Merchants and manufacturers complained about the rules and regulations that hindered their activities. At the court, many high nobles resented their exclusion from any real political role and talked about the necessity of reducing the excessive powers Louis XIV had gathered into his hands. One unhappy noble, the duc de Saint-Simon, documented their complaints in his extensive diaries. His acid portrait of the aging king and his faction-ridden court was published after his and the king's death, and has become both a literary classic and the source of much of our knowledge about French politics and opinion under Louis XIV.

Devout Catholics objected to a church that had become an instrument of political control; some of them joined a dissident Catholic movement, Jansenism, that called for a purer, stricter form of piety. Fearing that the Jansenists would weaken his authority over the church, Louis XIV pressured the Pope to issue a condemnation of their theological doctrines. The Pope's bull, Unigenitus, issued in 1713, only strengthened the Jansenists' determination to resist both Papal and royal authority. The Jansenist controversy would become one of the major divisions in France during the eighteenth century.

French fortunes reached their low point in 1709, following more military defeats. The winter of 1709-1710 was one of the coldest in French history, destroying crops and reducing much of the population to utter misery. Louis XIV was by now ready to make peace, but his enemies kept raising their demands as they saw France's difficulties mounting. Unwilling to accept demands that he regarded as humiliating for himself and dangerous for the country, Louis was driven to take the extraordinary step of appealing directly to his subjects for their support. "I come to ask for your councils and your aid in this encounter that involves your safety," he told them.

Divisions among France's enemies and better fortunes on the battlefield finally made it possible to bring the war to an end in 1713. The Bourbon Philip V remained king of Spain, but renounced any claim to the French throne, and France avoided having to cede territory gained earlier in Louis's reign. The war left France on the verge of bankruptcy, however, and the aged king was deeply unpopular. In the meantime, the death of his son and grandson during the last years of the war had left a young great-grandson as heir, raising the prospect of another troubled regency. Louis XIV's attempt to ensure the survival of the dynasty by making his illegitimate sons eligible for the throne further alienated key court figures. At his death in 1715, Louis XIV left behind a deeply troubled kingdom. His critics hoped that France would now move in the direction of a less centralized government with a less aggressive foreign policy.

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The Reign of Louis XIV (1643-1715): An Overview

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Born in 1638, Louis XIV succeeded his father, Louis XIII, as king at the age of five. He ruled for 72 years, until his death in 1715, making his reign the longest of any European monarch. By the time he died, he outlived his son and his grandson, leaving the throne to his young great-grandson Louis XV.

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- Louis was king for 72 years until he died in 1715
- Had the longest reign in European history (1643-1715)
- Built the opulent palace of Versailles.

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Louis XIV (born September 5, 1638, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France-died September 1, 1715, Versailles, France) was the king of France (1643-1715) who ruled his country, principally from his great palace at Versailles, during one of its most brilliant periods and who remains the symbol of absolute monarchy of the classical age. Internationally, in a series of wars between 1667 and 1697, he extended France's eastern borders at the expense of the Habsburgs and then, in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14), engaged a hostile European coalition in order to secure the Spanish throne for his grandson.

Early life and marriage

Louis was the son of Louis XIII and his Spanish queen, Anne of Austria. He succeeded his father on May 14, 1643. At the age of four years and eight months, he was, according to the laws of the kingdom, not only the master but the owner of the bodies and property of 19 million subjects. Although he was saluted as "a visible divinity," he was, nonetheless, a neglected child given over to the care of servants. He once narrowly escaped drowning in a pond because no one was watching him. Anne of Austria, who was to blame for this negligence, inspired him with a lasting fear of "crimes committed against God."

Louis was nine years old when the nobles and the Paris Parlement (a powerful law court), driven by hatred of the prime minister Jules Cardinal Mazarin, rose against the crown in 1648. This marked the beginning of the long civil war known as the Fronde, in the course of which Louis suffered poverty, misfortune, fear, humiliation, cold, and hunger. These trials shaped the future character, behaviour, and mode of thought of the young king. He would never forgive either Paris, the nobles, or the common people.

In 1653 Mazarin was victorious over the rebels and then proceeded to construct an extraordinary administrative apparatus with Louis as his pupil. The young king also acquired Mazarin's partiality for the arts, elegance, and display. Although he had been proclaimed of age, the king did not dream of disputing the cardinal's absolute power.

The war begun in 1635 between France and Spain was then entering its last phase. The outcome of the war would transfer European hegemony from the Habsburgs to the Bourbons. A French king had to be a soldier, and so Louis served his apprenticeship on the battlefield.

In 1658 Louis faced the great conflict between love and duty, a familiar one for princes of that period. He struggled with himself for two years over his love for Mazarin's niece, Marie Mancini. He finally submitted to the exigencies of politics and in 1660 married Marie-Thérèse of Austria, daughter of King Philip IV of Spain, in order to ratify peace between their two countries.

The childhood of Louis XIV was at an end, but no one believed him capable of seizing the reins of power. No one suspected his thoughts. He wrote in his Mémoires:

In my heart I prefer fame above all else, even life itself....Love of glory has the same subtleties as the most tender passions....In exercising a totally divine function here on earth, we must appear incapable of turmoils which could debase it.

The young king

Mazarin died on March 9, 1661. The dramatic blow came on March 10. The king informed his astonished ministers that he intended to assume all responsibility for ruling the kingdom. This had not occurred since the reign of Henry IV. It cannot be overemphasized that Louis XIV's action was not in accordance with tradition; his concept of a dictatorship by divine right was his own. In genuine faith, Louis viewed himself as God's representative on earth and considered all disobedience and rebellion to be sinful. From this conviction he gained not only a dangerous feeling of infallibility but also considerable serenity and moderation.

He was backed up first by the great ministers Jean-Baptiste Colbert, marquis de Louvois, and Hugues de Lionne, among whom he fostered dissension, and later by men of lesser capacity. For 54 years Louis devoted himself to his task eight hours a day; not the smallest detail escaped his attention. He wanted to control everything from court etiquette to troop movements, from road building to theological disputes. He succeeded because he faithfully reflected the mood of a France overflowing with youth and vigour and enamoured of grandeur.

Despite the use of pensions and punishments, the monarchy had been unable to subdue the nobles, who had started 11 civil wars in 40 years. Louis lured them to his court, corrupted them with gambling, exhausted them with dissipation, and made their destinies dependent on their capacity to please him. Etiquette became a means of governing. From that time, the nobility ceased to be an important factor in French politics, which in some respects weakened the nation.

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Louis XIV | Facts, Biography, Children, & Death

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Louis XIV, king of France (1643-1715) who ruled his country during one of its most brilliant periods and who remains the symbol of absolute monarchy of the classical age. He extended France's eastern borders at the expense of the Habsburgs and secured the Spanish throne for his grandson.

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He was the King of France who ruled from his palace of Versailles

He extended France's eastern borders against the Hasburgs.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Louis-XIV-king-of-France

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Louis XIV (born September 5, 1638, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France-died September 1, 1715, Versailles, France) was the king of France (1643-1715) who ruled his country, principally from his great palace at Versailles, during one of its most brilliant periods and who remains the symbol of absolute monarchy of the classical age. Internationally, in a series of wars between 1667 and 1697, he extended France's eastern borders at the expense of the Habsburgs and then, in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14), engaged a hostile European coalition in order to secure the Spanish throne for his grandson.

Early life and marriage

Louis was the son of Louis XIII and his Spanish queen, Anne of Austria. He succeeded his father on May 14, 1643. At the age of four years and eight months, he was, according to the laws of the kingdom, not only the master but the owner of the bodies and property of 19 million subjects. Although he was saluted as "a visible divinity," he was, nonetheless, a neglected child given over to the care of servants. He once narrowly escaped drowning in a pond because no one was watching him. Anne of Austria, who was to blame for this negligence, inspired him with a lasting fear of "crimes committed against God."

Louis was nine years old when the nobles and the Paris Parlement (a powerful law court), driven by hatred of the prime minister Jules Cardinal Mazarin, rose against the crown in 1648. This marked the beginning of the long civil war known as the Fronde, in the course of which Louis suffered poverty, misfortune, fear, humiliation, cold, and hunger. These trials shaped the future character, behaviour, and mode of thought of the young king. He would never forgive either Paris, the nobles, or the common people.

In 1653 Mazarin was victorious over the rebels and then proceeded to construct an extraordinary administrative apparatus with Louis as his pupil. The young king also acquired Mazarin's partiality for the arts, elegance, and display. Although he had been proclaimed of age, the king did not dream of disputing the cardinal's absolute power.

The war begun in 1635 between France and Spain was then entering its last phase. The outcome of the war would transfer European hegemony from the Habsburgs to the Bourbons. A French king had to be a soldier, and so Louis served his apprenticeship on the battlefield.

In 1658 Louis faced the great conflict between love and duty, a familiar one for princes of that period. He struggled with himself for two years over his love for Mazarin's niece, Marie Mancini. He finally submitted to the exigencies of politics and in 1660 married Marie-Thérèse of Austria, daughter of King Philip IV of Spain, in order to ratify peace between their two countries.

The childhood of Louis XIV was at an end, but no one believed him capable of seizing the reins of power. No one suspected his thoughts. He wrote in his Mémoires:

In my heart I prefer fame above all else, even life itself....Love of glory has the same subtleties as the most tender passions....In exercising a totally divine function here on earth, we must appear incapable of turmoils which could debase it.

The young king

Mazarin died on March 9, 1661. The dramatic blow came on March 10. The king informed his astonished ministers that he intended to assume all responsibility for ruling the kingdom. This had not occurred since the reign of Henry IV. It cannot be overemphasized that Louis XIV's action was not in accordance with tradition; his concept of a dictatorship by divine right was his own. In genuine faith, Louis viewed himself as God's representative on earth and considered all disobedience and rebellion to be sinful. From this conviction he gained not only a dangerous feeling of infallibility but also considerable serenity and moderation.

He was backed up first by the great ministers Jean-Baptiste Colbert, marquis de Louvois, and Hugues de Lionne, among whom he fostered dissension, and later by men of lesser capacity. For 54 years Louis devoted himself to his task eight hours a day; not the smallest detail escaped his attention. He wanted to control everything from court etiquette to troop movements, from road building to theological disputes. He succeeded because he faithfully reflected the mood of a France overflowing with youth and vigour and enamoured of grandeur.

Despite the use of pensions and punishments, the monarchy had been unable to subdue the nobles, who had started 11 civil wars in 40 years. Louis lured them to his court, corrupted them with gambling, exhausted them with dissipation, and made their destinies dependent on their capacity to please him. Etiquette became a means of governing. From that time, the nobility ceased to be an important factor in French politics, which in some respects weakened the nation.

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Louis XIV | Facts, Biography, Children, & Death

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Louis XIV, king of France (1643-1715) who ruled his country during one of its most brilliant periods and who remains the symbol of absolute monarchy of the classical age. He extended France's eastern borders at the expense of the Habsburgs and secured the Spanish throne for his grandson.

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He died in 1715 and had the longest reign as a European monarch. He strongly believed in absolutism and came the closest to achieving that goal out of all of the French monarchs. He believed the monarchy should be the most powerful entity and the people must obey him.
https://history.as.uky.edu/reign-louis-xiv-1643-1715-overview

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Born in 1638, Louis XIV succeeded his father, Louis XIII, as king at the age of five. He ruled for 72 years, until his death in 1715, making his reign the longest of any European monarch. By the time he died, he outlived his son and his grandson, leaving the throne to his young great-grandson Louis XV. Louis XIV's reign was important in French history not just because it lasted so long but because he was a strong-willed ruler who was determined to make his subjects obey him and to make his kingdom the predominant power in Europe. He came closer than any other French king to making the political theory of absolutism a reality.

Louis XIV's childhood was marked by the upheaval of the Fronde (1648-1653), which left him with a lasting horror of disorder. The Fronde had shown that the royal judges of the Parlement, the great nobles, the provincial political elites, and the common people could all pose threats to royal authority. Louis XIV would attempt to insure that none of these groups would be able to oppose the central government as they had during the Fronde.

During the early years of his reign, Louis XIV remained dependent on Mazarin, the minister who had loyally served his mother during the Fronde. Mazarin transmitted to Louis XIV the practices that Henri IV, Sully, and Richelieu had developed in the early decades of the seventeenth century. The treaty of the Pyrenees (1659) ended the long war between France and Spain, which had continued even after the settlement of the Thirty Years' War in 1648, on terms favorable to France. France had clearly replaced Spain as Europe's most powerful kingdom.

As an adolescent, Louis XIV threw himself into the social whirl of the court and the pursuit of young women; he did not seem particularly serious about his political responsibilities. When Mazarin died in 1661, everyone expected him to find a new principal minister to take on the burden of actually running the government. To the court's surprise, Louis announced that he intended to be his own principal minister. There would be no equivalent to Sully, Richelieu, or Mazarin for the rest of his reign. Soon after Mazarin's death, Louis had the ambitious finance minister Fouquet, who had hoped to dominate the government, arrested, and his lavish estate confiscated. Impressed by the architect and garden designer who had created Fouquet's palace at Vaux-le-Vicomte, Louis later hired them to create his own palace at Versailles.

Although Louis XIV tried to oversee all aspects of the government, he did rely on ministers for assistance in carrying out his policies. The fate of Fouquet had shown these men, however, that they could not aspire to personal dominance in the style of Richelieu and Mazarin. Louis was careful to divide his favor among competing ministers and encourage rivalries among them, so that he would always be in a position to make the decisions that mattered.

The most important minister in the first half of Louis XIV's reign was Colbert, a former assistant of Mazarin's. Colbert is remembered above all for his efforts to regulate the French economy. He believed that an organized effort was needed to allow France to surpass its rivals, particularly the Netherlands and England. French merchants and manufacturers were strictly regulated to avoid what Colbert regarded as wasteful competition and to make sure that their goods were of high quality. Colbert tried to encourage the development of domestic manufactures to replace goods that France had had to import from abroad, especially expensive luxury products. His mercantilist policies discouraged imports through high tariffs and tried to build up export industries whose sales abroad would increase the amount of money flowing into the kingdom.

Building up France's economy was just one part of Louis XIV's program for increasing the country's power. In his view, the most important duty of a ruler was to seek gloire (glory) for himself and his country through military successes. The war minister, Louvois, was put in charge of organizing an army that soon grew to be Europe's largest. In 1665, Louis XIV launched an attack on the Spanish provinces in the Netherlands, along France's northern borders. This War of Devolution (1666-68) added the important city of Lille to French territory. In 1672, France attacked the Netherlands, an important commercial rival. The French expected an easy victory over their much smaller opponent, but the Dutch succeeded in finding allies and put up a stiff resistance. Although Louis XIV's propagandists proclaimed the war a triumph, in fact it ended in 1678 with only minor gains for France.

At home, Louis XIV continued his efforts to strengthen royal power. He systematized Richelieu's method of controlling the provinces through appointed officials by creating a system of permanent intendants, one for each of the country's provinces. The intendants, who could be moved or dismissed by the king, oversaw the enforcement of laws and the collection of taxes, and reported regularly to the king about events in their province. French subjects became accustomed to the permanent presence of royal authority throughout the country. In 1673, Louis curtailed the powers of the parlements, the royal courts. They were forbidden to protest against the provisions of new laws until after they had registered them. This greatly reduced the courts' ability to obstruct royal policy and influence the population.

Although he was determined to be obeyed, Louis XIV understood that he needed cooperation from his subjects to carry out his policies. He offered the country's noble elites a virtual monopoly on government offices and favors in exchange for their support. In France's towns, elected city councils were replaced with officials named by the king, who could be counted on to give him their loyalty. To raise money, he created and sold an ever-increasing number of venal offices. Louis XIV distrusted the lower classes, viewing them as a potential source of disorder. He created large hopitaux (hospices) where beggars, orphans, criminals and the insane were forcibly locked up under tight supervision.

Like his predecessors Henri IV and Louis XIII, Louis XIV wanted to see France achieve religious unity. Although he was a devout Catholic, he resented the Pope's efforts to control the French Church. In 1682, he imposed the Gallican articles on the French hierarchy, giving the king almost total control over the naming of bishops and the internal affairs of the church. Urged on by militant Catholics who convinced him that the Protestant minority was too weak to resist, Louis decided in 1685 that the time had come to revoke the edict of Nantes. Protestant worship in France was forbidden, and drastic measures, such as quartering troops in Protestant homes, were used to pressure them to convert. About one-third of France's Protestants fled abroad to escape this persecution; others formed an underground movement, holding religious services in forests and remote mountain areas. The Protestant exiles waged a propaganda campaign against Louis XIV from their refuges in the Netherlands and elsewhere, significantly damaging the king's reputation abroad.

Throughout the early 1680s, Louis XIV continued his aggressive drive to expand France's borders, particularly along the Rhine river. The annexation of the historically German city of Strasbourg in 1681 gave him control of the strategic province of Alsace. France's push toward the Rhine brought Louis XIV into conflict with the Austrian Habsburg dynasty, but Emperor Leopold I was distracted by a war against the Ottoman Empire, whose armies threatened his capital of Vienna in 1683. Although the Austrians were fellow Christians, Louis XIV encouraged the Turks, further poisoning relations with the Habsburgs.

Once the Austrians had defeated the Turks, they joined an alliance with France's other enemies. Leadership of this coalition came from the Dutch leader William of Orange, who became king of England in 1688 as William III, replacing James II who Louis XIV had supported. In 1688, France found itself involved in a new round of warfare against an alliance that included all the other major European powers: England, the Netherlands, Austria, and Prussia. Huguenot exiles driven out of France after 1685 waged an effective propaganda campaign against Louis XIV. The war of the League of Augsburg lasted until 1697. The death of the capable war minister Louvois in 1691 deprived Louis of a valuable advisor. Although the French won some major battles, Louis XIV was unable to break up the enemy coalition, and the final peace settlement was a barely disguised defeat for him.

The war of the League of Augsburg left France financially exhausted, and the aging king was not eager to start another conflict. When Charles II, the king of Spain, died without an heir in 1700 and left his throne to a French Bourbon prince, however, Louis found himself in a dilemma. France's enemies refused to accept an arrangement that they feared would some day lead to a union of France and Spain. Louis was unwilling to renounce such a significant gain in France's diplomatic and military position. Negotiations with William III and Leopold I broke down, and in 1701 France again found itself at war with the British, Dutch, and Austrians.

The war of the Spanish Succession (1701-1713) was the largest and costliest European war up to that time. At its height, the French army grew to more than 400,000 men, three times as large as it had been during the Thirty Years' War. The cost of maintaining this huge war effort was crippling. Taxes increased to record levels. The king's effort to increase the capitation, a tax paid by all subjects regardless of their social status, put a strain on the alliance with the nobility that had been the basis of Louis's system. Protestants in the remote southern region of the Cévennes revolted in 1703, starting a guerilla war that became an additional drain on resources. The French army also suffered several major defeats, most notably at the battle of Blenheim in 1704, when the British forces commanded by the Duke of Marlborough won a devastating victory.

The disasters of the war generated increasing criticism of Louis XIV and his heavy-handed absolutist system. Merchants and manufacturers complained about the rules and regulations that hindered their activities. At the court, many high nobles resented their exclusion from any real political role and talked about the necessity of reducing the excessive powers Louis XIV had gathered into his hands. One unhappy noble, the duc de Saint-Simon, documented their complaints in his extensive diaries. His acid portrait of the aging king and his faction-ridden court was published after his and the king's death, and has become both a literary classic and the source of much of our knowledge about French politics and opinion under Louis XIV.

Devout Catholics objected to a church that had become an instrument of political control; some of them joined a dissident Catholic movement, Jansenism, that called for a purer, stricter form of piety. Fearing that the Jansenists would weaken his authority over the church, Louis XIV pressured the Pope to issue a condemnation of their theological doctrines. The Pope's bull, Unigenitus, issued in 1713, only strengthened the Jansenists' determination to resist both Papal and royal authority. The Jansenist controversy would become one of the major divisions in France during the eighteenth century.

French fortunes reached their low point in 1709, following more military defeats. The winter of 1709-1710 was one of the coldest in French history, destroying crops and reducing much of the population to utter misery. Louis XIV was by now ready to make peace, but his enemies kept raising their demands as they saw France's difficulties mounting. Unwilling to accept demands that he regarded as humiliating for himself and dangerous for the country, Louis was driven to take the extraordinary step of appealing directly to his subjects for their support. "I come to ask for your councils and your aid in this encounter that involves your safety," he told them.

Divisions among France's enemies and better fortunes on the battlefield finally made it possible to bring the war to an end in 1713. The Bourbon Philip V remained king of Spain, but renounced any claim to the French throne, and France avoided having to cede territory gained earlier in Louis's reign. The war left France on the verge of bankruptcy, however, and the aged king was deeply unpopular. In the meantime, the death of his son and grandson during the last years of the war had left a young great-grandson as heir, raising the prospect of another troubled regency. Louis XIV's attempt to ensure the survival of the dynasty by making his illegitimate sons eligible for the throne further alienated key court figures. At his death in 1715, Louis XIV left behind a deeply troubled kingdom. His critics hoped that France would now move in the direction of a less centralized government with a less aggressive foreign policy.

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The Reign of Louis XIV (1643-1715): An Overview

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Born in 1638, Louis XIV succeeded his father, Louis XIII, as king at the age of five. He ruled for 72 years, until his death in 1715, making his reign the longest of any European monarch. By the time he died, he outlived his son and his grandson, leaving the throne to his young great-grandson Louis XV.

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Broke tradition by ruling without a Chief Minister

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Early Life of Louis XIV

Born on September 5, 1638, to King Louis XIII of France and his Habsburg queen, Anne of Austria, the future Louis XIV was his parents' first child after 23 years of marriage; in recognition of this apparent miracle, he was christened Louis-Dieudonné, meaning "gift of God."

A younger brother, Philippe, followed two years later. When his father died on May 14, 1643, 4-year-old Louis inherited the crown of a fractured, unstable and nearly insolvent France.

After orchestrating the annulment of Louis XIII's will, which had appointed a regency council to rule on the young king's behalf, Anne served as sole regent for her son, assisted by her chief minister and close confidant, the Italian-born Cardinal Jules Mazarin.

Did you know? At the Palace of Versailles, aristocrats were expected to compete for the privilege of watching Louis XIV wake up, eat meals and prepare for bed.

The Fronde

During the early years of Louis XIV's reign, Anne and Mazarin introduced policies that further consolidated the monarchy's power, angering nobles and members of the legal aristocracy.

Beginning in 1648, their discontent erupted into a civil war known as the Fronde, which forced the royal family to flee Paris and instilled a lifelong fear of rebellion in the young king. Mazarin suppressed the revolt in 1653 and by decade's end had restored internal order and negotiated a peace treaty with Hapsburg Spain, making France a leading European power.

The following year, 22-year-old Louis married his first cousin Marie-Thérèse, daughter of King Philip IV of Spain. A diplomatic necessity more than anything else, the union produced six children, of whom only one, Louis, survived to adulthood. (A number of illegitimate offspring resulted from Louis XIV's affairs with a string of official and unofficial mistresses.)

Sun King

After Mazarin's death in 1661, Louis XIV broke with tradition and astonished his court by declaring that he would rule without a chief minister. He viewed himself as the direct representative of God, endowed with a divine right to wield the absolute power of the monarchy.

To illustrate his status, he chose the sun as his emblem and cultivated the image of an omniscient and infallible "Roi-Soleil" ("Sun King") around whom the entire realm orbited. While some historians question the attribution, Louis is often remembered for the bold and infamous statement "L'État, c'est moi" ("I am the State").

Immediately after assuming control of the government, Louis worked tirelessly to centralize and tighten control of France and its overseas colonies. His finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, implemented reforms that sharply reduced the deficit and fostered the growth of industry, while his war minister, the Marquis de Louvois, expanded and reorganized the French army.

Louis also managed to pacify and disempower the historically rebellious nobles, who had fomented no less than 11 civil wars in four decades, by luring them to his court and habituating them to the opulent lifestyle there.

The Arts and the Royal Court Under Louis XIV

A hard-working and meticulous administrator who oversaw his programs down to the last detail, Louis XIV nevertheless appreciated art, literature, music, theater and sports. He surrounded himself with some of the greatest artistic and intellectual figures of his time, including the playwright Molière, the painter Charles Le Brun and the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully.

He also appointed himself patron of the Académie Française, the body that regulates the French language, and established various institutes for the arts and sciences.

To accommodate his retinue of newly devoted nobles (and, perhaps, to distance himself from the population of Paris), Louis built several lavish châteaux that depleted the nation's coffers while drawing accusations of extravagance.

Versailles

Most famously, he transformed a royal hunting lodge in Versailles, a village 25 miles southwest of the capital, into one of the largest and most extravagant palaces in the world, officially moving his court and government there in 1682.

It was against this awe-inspiring backdrop that Louis tamed the nobility and impressed foreign dignitaries, using entertainment, ceremony and a highly codified system of etiquette to assert his supremacy.

Versailles' festive atmosphere dissipated to some extent when Louis came under the influence of the pious and orderly Marquise de Maintenon, who had served as his illegitimate children's governess; the two wed in a private ceremony approximately one year after the death of Queen Marie-Thérèse in 1683.

Louis XIV and Foreign Policy

In 1667 Louis XIV launched the War of Devolution -the first in a series of military conflicts that characterized his aggressive approach to foreign policy-by invading the Spanish Netherlands, which he claimed as his wife's inheritance. Under pressure from the English, Swedish and especially the Dutch, France retreated and returned the region to Spain, gaining only some frontier towns in Flanders.

This unsatisfactory outcome led to the Franco-Dutch War (1672-1678), in which France acquired more territory in Flanders as well as the Franche-Comté region. Now at the height of his powers and influence, Louis established "chambers of reunion" to annex disputed cities and towns along France's border through quasi-legal means.

France's position as the dominant military and economic power on the continent-coupled with a colonial presence that burgeoned under Louis XIV-was perceived as a threat by other European nations, including England, the Holy Roman Empire and Spain.

War of the Spanish Succession

In the late 1680s, responding to yet another spate of expansionist campaigns by Louis' armies, several powerful countries formed a coalition known as the Grand Alliance. The ensuing war, fought on both hemispheres, lasted from 1688 to 1697; France emerged with most of its territory intact but its resources severely strained.

More disastrous for Louis XIV was the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), in which the aging king defended his grandson Philip V's inheritance of Spain and its empire. The long conflict plunged a famine-ridden France into massive debt, turning public opinion against the crown.

Louis XIV and Religion

It was not only decades of warfare that weakened both France and its monarch during the latter half of Louis XIV's reign. In 1685, the devoutly Catholic king revoked the Edict of Nantes, issued by his grandfather Henry IV in 1598, which had granted freedom of worship and other rights to French Protestants, known as Huguenots.

With the 1685 Edict of Fontainebleau, Louis ordered the destruction of Protestant churches, the closure of Protestant schools and the expulsion of Protestant clergy. Protestants would be barred from assembling and their marriages would be deemed invalid. Baptism and education in the Catholic faith would be required of all children.

Roughly one million Huguenots lived in France at the time, and many were merchants, artisans or other types of skilled workers. Although emigration of Protestants was explicitly forbidden by the Edict of Fontainebleau, thousands of people-estimates range from 200,000 to 800,000-fled in the decades that followed, settling in England, Switzerland, Germany and the American colonies, among other places.

Louis XIV's act of religious zeal-advised, some have suggested, by the Marquise de Maintenon-had cost the country a valuable segment of its labor force while drawing the outrage of its Protestant neighbors.

Death of Louis XIV

On September 1, 1715, four days before his 77th birthday, Louis XIV died of gangrene at Versailles. His reign had lasted 72 years, longer than that of any other known European monarch, and left an indelible mark on the culture, history and destiny of France. His five-year-old great-grandson succeeded him as Louis XV.

Sources

The Edict of Nantes, 1598. Columbia University Core Curriculum.
History. Chateau de Versailles.
The Reign of Louis XIV (1643-1715): An Overview. University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences.
History: Louis XIV (1638-1715). BBC.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

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Louis XIV: Sun King, Spouse & Versailles | HISTORY

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Louis XIV, the Sun King, ruled France for 72 years. He built the opulent palace of Versailles, but his wars and the Edict of Nantes left France drained and weak.

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- reigned 72 years and 110 days
- has 16 kids
- born on September 5th, 1638
- died on September 1st, 1715

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- Known as Louis the Great or the Sun King
- King of France 1643-1715. Became king at 5

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During his years while ruling, he relied heavily on Mazarin, who was a minister that served his mother during the Fronde.

https://history.as.uky.edu/reign-louis-xiv-1643-1715-overview

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Born in 1638, Louis XIV succeeded his father, Louis XIII, as king at the age of five. He ruled for 72 years, until his death in 1715, making his reign the longest of any European monarch. By the time he died, he outlived his son and his grandson, leaving the throne to his young great-grandson Louis XV. Louis XIV's reign was important in French history not just because it lasted so long but because he was a strong-willed ruler who was determined to make his subjects obey him and to make his kingdom the predominant power in Europe. He came closer than any other French king to making the political theory of absolutism a reality.

Louis XIV's childhood was marked by the upheaval of the Fronde (1648-1653), which left him with a lasting horror of disorder. The Fronde had shown that the royal judges of the Parlement, the great nobles, the provincial political elites, and the common people could all pose threats to royal authority. Louis XIV would attempt to insure that none of these groups would be able to oppose the central government as they had during the Fronde.

During the early years of his reign, Louis XIV remained dependent on Mazarin, the minister who had loyally served his mother during the Fronde. Mazarin transmitted to Louis XIV the practices that Henri IV, Sully, and Richelieu had developed in the early decades of the seventeenth century. The treaty of the Pyrenees (1659) ended the long war between France and Spain, which had continued even after the settlement of the Thirty Years' War in 1648, on terms favorable to France. France had clearly replaced Spain as Europe's most powerful kingdom.

As an adolescent, Louis XIV threw himself into the social whirl of the court and the pursuit of young women; he did not seem particularly serious about his political responsibilities. When Mazarin died in 1661, everyone expected him to find a new principal minister to take on the burden of actually running the government. To the court's surprise, Louis announced that he intended to be his own principal minister. There would be no equivalent to Sully, Richelieu, or Mazarin for the rest of his reign. Soon after Mazarin's death, Louis had the ambitious finance minister Fouquet, who had hoped to dominate the government, arrested, and his lavish estate confiscated. Impressed by the architect and garden designer who had created Fouquet's palace at Vaux-le-Vicomte, Louis later hired them to create his own palace at Versailles.

Although Louis XIV tried to oversee all aspects of the government, he did rely on ministers for assistance in carrying out his policies. The fate of Fouquet had shown these men, however, that they could not aspire to personal dominance in the style of Richelieu and Mazarin. Louis was careful to divide his favor among competing ministers and encourage rivalries among them, so that he would always be in a position to make the decisions that mattered.

The most important minister in the first half of Louis XIV's reign was Colbert, a former assistant of Mazarin's. Colbert is remembered above all for his efforts to regulate the French economy. He believed that an organized effort was needed to allow France to surpass its rivals, particularly the Netherlands and England. French merchants and manufacturers were strictly regulated to avoid what Colbert regarded as wasteful competition and to make sure that their goods were of high quality. Colbert tried to encourage the development of domestic manufactures to replace goods that France had had to import from abroad, especially expensive luxury products. His mercantilist policies discouraged imports through high tariffs and tried to build up export industries whose sales abroad would increase the amount of money flowing into the kingdom.

Building up France's economy was just one part of Louis XIV's program for increasing the country's power. In his view, the most important duty of a ruler was to seek gloire (glory) for himself and his country through military successes. The war minister, Louvois, was put in charge of organizing an army that soon grew to be Europe's largest. In 1665, Louis XIV launched an attack on the Spanish provinces in the Netherlands, along France's northern borders. This War of Devolution (1666-68) added the important city of Lille to French territory. In 1672, France attacked the Netherlands, an important commercial rival. The French expected an easy victory over their much smaller opponent, but the Dutch succeeded in finding allies and put up a stiff resistance. Although Louis XIV's propagandists proclaimed the war a triumph, in fact it ended in 1678 with only minor gains for France.

At home, Louis XIV continued his efforts to strengthen royal power. He systematized Richelieu's method of controlling the provinces through appointed officials by creating a system of permanent intendants, one for each of the country's provinces. The intendants, who could be moved or dismissed by the king, oversaw the enforcement of laws and the collection of taxes, and reported regularly to the king about events in their province. French subjects became accustomed to the permanent presence of royal authority throughout the country. In 1673, Louis curtailed the powers of the parlements, the royal courts. They were forbidden to protest against the provisions of new laws until after they had registered them. This greatly reduced the courts' ability to obstruct royal policy and influence the population.

Although he was determined to be obeyed, Louis XIV understood that he needed cooperation from his subjects to carry out his policies. He offered the country's noble elites a virtual monopoly on government offices and favors in exchange for their support. In France's towns, elected city councils were replaced with officials named by the king, who could be counted on to give him their loyalty. To raise money, he created and sold an ever-increasing number of venal offices. Louis XIV distrusted the lower classes, viewing them as a potential source of disorder. He created large hopitaux (hospices) where beggars, orphans, criminals and the insane were forcibly locked up under tight supervision.

Like his predecessors Henri IV and Louis XIII, Louis XIV wanted to see France achieve religious unity. Although he was a devout Catholic, he resented the Pope's efforts to control the French Church. In 1682, he imposed the Gallican articles on the French hierarchy, giving the king almost total control over the naming of bishops and the internal affairs of the church. Urged on by militant Catholics who convinced him that the Protestant minority was too weak to resist, Louis decided in 1685 that the time had come to revoke the edict of Nantes. Protestant worship in France was forbidden, and drastic measures, such as quartering troops in Protestant homes, were used to pressure them to convert. About one-third of France's Protestants fled abroad to escape this persecution; others formed an underground movement, holding religious services in forests and remote mountain areas. The Protestant exiles waged a propaganda campaign against Louis XIV from their refuges in the Netherlands and elsewhere, significantly damaging the king's reputation abroad.

Throughout the early 1680s, Louis XIV continued his aggressive drive to expand France's borders, particularly along the Rhine river. The annexation of the historically German city of Strasbourg in 1681 gave him control of the strategic province of Alsace. France's push toward the Rhine brought Louis XIV into conflict with the Austrian Habsburg dynasty, but Emperor Leopold I was distracted by a war against the Ottoman Empire, whose armies threatened his capital of Vienna in 1683. Although the Austrians were fellow Christians, Louis XIV encouraged the Turks, further poisoning relations with the Habsburgs.

Once the Austrians had defeated the Turks, they joined an alliance with France's other enemies. Leadership of this coalition came from the Dutch leader William of Orange, who became king of England in 1688 as William III, replacing James II who Louis XIV had supported. In 1688, France found itself involved in a new round of warfare against an alliance that included all the other major European powers: England, the Netherlands, Austria, and Prussia. Huguenot exiles driven out of France after 1685 waged an effective propaganda campaign against Louis XIV. The war of the League of Augsburg lasted until 1697. The death of the capable war minister Louvois in 1691 deprived Louis of a valuable advisor. Although the French won some major battles, Louis XIV was unable to break up the enemy coalition, and the final peace settlement was a barely disguised defeat for him.

The war of the League of Augsburg left France financially exhausted, and the aging king was not eager to start another conflict. When Charles II, the king of Spain, died without an heir in 1700 and left his throne to a French Bourbon prince, however, Louis found himself in a dilemma. France's enemies refused to accept an arrangement that they feared would some day lead to a union of France and Spain. Louis was unwilling to renounce such a significant gain in France's diplomatic and military position. Negotiations with William III and Leopold I broke down, and in 1701 France again found itself at war with the British, Dutch, and Austrians.

The war of the Spanish Succession (1701-1713) was the largest and costliest European war up to that time. At its height, the French army grew to more than 400,000 men, three times as large as it had been during the Thirty Years' War. The cost of maintaining this huge war effort was crippling. Taxes increased to record levels. The king's effort to increase the capitation, a tax paid by all subjects regardless of their social status, put a strain on the alliance with the nobility that had been the basis of Louis's system. Protestants in the remote southern region of the Cévennes revolted in 1703, starting a guerilla war that became an additional drain on resources. The French army also suffered several major defeats, most notably at the battle of Blenheim in 1704, when the British forces commanded by the Duke of Marlborough won a devastating victory.

The disasters of the war generated increasing criticism of Louis XIV and his heavy-handed absolutist system. Merchants and manufacturers complained about the rules and regulations that hindered their activities. At the court, many high nobles resented their exclusion from any real political role and talked about the necessity of reducing the excessive powers Louis XIV had gathered into his hands. One unhappy noble, the duc de Saint-Simon, documented their complaints in his extensive diaries. His acid portrait of the aging king and his faction-ridden court was published after his and the king's death, and has become both a literary classic and the source of much of our knowledge about French politics and opinion under Louis XIV.

Devout Catholics objected to a church that had become an instrument of political control; some of them joined a dissident Catholic movement, Jansenism, that called for a purer, stricter form of piety. Fearing that the Jansenists would weaken his authority over the church, Louis XIV pressured the Pope to issue a condemnation of their theological doctrines. The Pope's bull, Unigenitus, issued in 1713, only strengthened the Jansenists' determination to resist both Papal and royal authority. The Jansenist controversy would become one of the major divisions in France during the eighteenth century.

French fortunes reached their low point in 1709, following more military defeats. The winter of 1709-1710 was one of the coldest in French history, destroying crops and reducing much of the population to utter misery. Louis XIV was by now ready to make peace, but his enemies kept raising their demands as they saw France's difficulties mounting. Unwilling to accept demands that he regarded as humiliating for himself and dangerous for the country, Louis was driven to take the extraordinary step of appealing directly to his subjects for their support. "I come to ask for your councils and your aid in this encounter that involves your safety," he told them.

Divisions among France's enemies and better fortunes on the battlefield finally made it possible to bring the war to an end in 1713. The Bourbon Philip V remained king of Spain, but renounced any claim to the French throne, and France avoided having to cede territory gained earlier in Louis's reign. The war left France on the verge of bankruptcy, however, and the aged king was deeply unpopular. In the meantime, the death of his son and grandson during the last years of the war had left a young great-grandson as heir, raising the prospect of another troubled regency. Louis XIV's attempt to ensure the survival of the dynasty by making his illegitimate sons eligible for the throne further alienated key court figures. At his death in 1715, Louis XIV left behind a deeply troubled kingdom. His critics hoped that France would now move in the direction of a less centralized government with a less aggressive foreign policy.

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The Reign of Louis XIV (1643-1715): An Overview

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Born in 1638, Louis XIV succeeded his father, Louis XIII, as king at the age of five. He ruled for 72 years, until his death in 1715, making his reign the longest of any European monarch. By the time he died, he outlived his son and his grandson, leaving the throne to his young great-grandson Louis XV.

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The fronde- further isolated the monarchs power- force the royal family to flee paris- also instilled the "lifelong" fear of rebellion.

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Early Life of Louis XIV

Born on September 5, 1638, to King Louis XIII of France and his Habsburg queen, Anne of Austria, the future Louis XIV was his parents' first child after 23 years of marriage; in recognition of this apparent miracle, he was christened Louis-Dieudonné, meaning "gift of God."

A younger brother, Philippe, followed two years later. When his father died on May 14, 1643, 4-year-old Louis inherited the crown of a fractured, unstable and nearly insolvent France.

After orchestrating the annulment of Louis XIII's will, which had appointed a regency council to rule on the young king's behalf, Anne served as sole regent for her son, assisted by her chief minister and close confidant, the Italian-born Cardinal Jules Mazarin.

Did you know? At the Palace of Versailles, aristocrats were expected to compete for the privilege of watching Louis XIV wake up, eat meals and prepare for bed.

The Fronde

During the early years of Louis XIV's reign, Anne and Mazarin introduced policies that further consolidated the monarchy's power, angering nobles and members of the legal aristocracy.

Beginning in 1648, their discontent erupted into a civil war known as the Fronde, which forced the royal family to flee Paris and instilled a lifelong fear of rebellion in the young king. Mazarin suppressed the revolt in 1653 and by decade's end had restored internal order and negotiated a peace treaty with Hapsburg Spain, making France a leading European power.

The following year, 22-year-old Louis married his first cousin Marie-Thérèse, daughter of King Philip IV of Spain. A diplomatic necessity more than anything else, the union produced six children, of whom only one, Louis, survived to adulthood. (A number of illegitimate offspring resulted from Louis XIV's affairs with a string of official and unofficial mistresses.)

Sun King

After Mazarin's death in 1661, Louis XIV broke with tradition and astonished his court by declaring that he would rule without a chief minister. He viewed himself as the direct representative of God, endowed with a divine right to wield the absolute power of the monarchy.

To illustrate his status, he chose the sun as his emblem and cultivated the image of an omniscient and infallible "Roi-Soleil" ("Sun King") around whom the entire realm orbited. While some historians question the attribution, Louis is often remembered for the bold and infamous statement "L'État, c'est moi" ("I am the State").

Immediately after assuming control of the government, Louis worked tirelessly to centralize and tighten control of France and its overseas colonies. His finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, implemented reforms that sharply reduced the deficit and fostered the growth of industry, while his war minister, the Marquis de Louvois, expanded and reorganized the French army.

Louis also managed to pacify and disempower the historically rebellious nobles, who had fomented no less than 11 civil wars in four decades, by luring them to his court and habituating them to the opulent lifestyle there.

The Arts and the Royal Court Under Louis XIV

A hard-working and meticulous administrator who oversaw his programs down to the last detail, Louis XIV nevertheless appreciated art, literature, music, theater and sports. He surrounded himself with some of the greatest artistic and intellectual figures of his time, including the playwright Molière, the painter Charles Le Brun and the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully.

He also appointed himself patron of the Académie Française, the body that regulates the French language, and established various institutes for the arts and sciences.

To accommodate his retinue of newly devoted nobles (and, perhaps, to distance himself from the population of Paris), Louis built several lavish châteaux that depleted the nation's coffers while drawing accusations of extravagance.

Versailles

Most famously, he transformed a royal hunting lodge in Versailles, a village 25 miles southwest of the capital, into one of the largest and most extravagant palaces in the world, officially moving his court and government there in 1682.

It was against this awe-inspiring backdrop that Louis tamed the nobility and impressed foreign dignitaries, using entertainment, ceremony and a highly codified system of etiquette to assert his supremacy.

Versailles' festive atmosphere dissipated to some extent when Louis came under the influence of the pious and orderly Marquise de Maintenon, who had served as his illegitimate children's governess; the two wed in a private ceremony approximately one year after the death of Queen Marie-Thérèse in 1683.

Louis XIV and Foreign Policy

In 1667 Louis XIV launched the War of Devolution -the first in a series of military conflicts that characterized his aggressive approach to foreign policy-by invading the Spanish Netherlands, which he claimed as his wife's inheritance. Under pressure from the English, Swedish and especially the Dutch, France retreated and returned the region to Spain, gaining only some frontier towns in Flanders.

This unsatisfactory outcome led to the Franco-Dutch War (1672-1678), in which France acquired more territory in Flanders as well as the Franche-Comté region. Now at the height of his powers and influence, Louis established "chambers of reunion" to annex disputed cities and towns along France's border through quasi-legal means.

France's position as the dominant military and economic power on the continent-coupled with a colonial presence that burgeoned under Louis XIV-was perceived as a threat by other European nations, including England, the Holy Roman Empire and Spain.

War of the Spanish Succession

In the late 1680s, responding to yet another spate of expansionist campaigns by Louis' armies, several powerful countries formed a coalition known as the Grand Alliance. The ensuing war, fought on both hemispheres, lasted from 1688 to 1697; France emerged with most of its territory intact but its resources severely strained.

More disastrous for Louis XIV was the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), in which the aging king defended his grandson Philip V's inheritance of Spain and its empire. The long conflict plunged a famine-ridden France into massive debt, turning public opinion against the crown.

Louis XIV and Religion

It was not only decades of warfare that weakened both France and its monarch during the latter half of Louis XIV's reign. In 1685, the devoutly Catholic king revoked the Edict of Nantes, issued by his grandfather Henry IV in 1598, which had granted freedom of worship and other rights to French Protestants, known as Huguenots.

With the 1685 Edict of Fontainebleau, Louis ordered the destruction of Protestant churches, the closure of Protestant schools and the expulsion of Protestant clergy. Protestants would be barred from assembling and their marriages would be deemed invalid. Baptism and education in the Catholic faith would be required of all children.

Roughly one million Huguenots lived in France at the time, and many were merchants, artisans or other types of skilled workers. Although emigration of Protestants was explicitly forbidden by the Edict of Fontainebleau, thousands of people-estimates range from 200,000 to 800,000-fled in the decades that followed, settling in England, Switzerland, Germany and the American colonies, among other places.

Louis XIV's act of religious zeal-advised, some have suggested, by the Marquise de Maintenon-had cost the country a valuable segment of its labor force while drawing the outrage of its Protestant neighbors.

Death of Louis XIV

On September 1, 1715, four days before his 77th birthday, Louis XIV died of gangrene at Versailles. His reign had lasted 72 years, longer than that of any other known European monarch, and left an indelible mark on the culture, history and destiny of France. His five-year-old great-grandson succeeded him as Louis XV.

Sources

The Edict of Nantes, 1598. Columbia University Core Curriculum.
History. Chateau de Versailles.
The Reign of Louis XIV (1643-1715): An Overview. University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences.
History: Louis XIV (1638-1715). BBC.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

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Louis XIV: Sun King, Spouse & Versailles | HISTORY

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Louis XIV, the Sun King, ruled France for 72 years. He built the opulent palace of Versailles, but his wars and the Edict of Nantes left France drained and weak.

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Was the king of france for 72 years and became king at 5 years old following the death of his father.
https://history.as.uky.edu/reign-louis-xiv-1643-1715-overview

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Born in 1638, Louis XIV succeeded his father, Louis XIII, as king at the age of five. He ruled for 72 years, until his death in 1715, making his reign the longest of any European monarch. By the time he died, he outlived his son and his grandson, leaving the throne to his young great-grandson Louis XV. Louis XIV's reign was important in French history not just because it lasted so long but because he was a strong-willed ruler who was determined to make his subjects obey him and to make his kingdom the predominant power in Europe. He came closer than any other French king to making the political theory of absolutism a reality.

Louis XIV's childhood was marked by the upheaval of the Fronde (1648-1653), which left him with a lasting horror of disorder. The Fronde had shown that the royal judges of the Parlement, the great nobles, the provincial political elites, and the common people could all pose threats to royal authority. Louis XIV would attempt to insure that none of these groups would be able to oppose the central government as they had during the Fronde.

During the early years of his reign, Louis XIV remained dependent on Mazarin, the minister who had loyally served his mother during the Fronde. Mazarin transmitted to Louis XIV the practices that Henri IV, Sully, and Richelieu had developed in the early decades of the seventeenth century. The treaty of the Pyrenees (1659) ended the long war between France and Spain, which had continued even after the settlement of the Thirty Years' War in 1648, on terms favorable to France. France had clearly replaced Spain as Europe's most powerful kingdom.

As an adolescent, Louis XIV threw himself into the social whirl of the court and the pursuit of young women; he did not seem particularly serious about his political responsibilities. When Mazarin died in 1661, everyone expected him to find a new principal minister to take on the burden of actually running the government. To the court's surprise, Louis announced that he intended to be his own principal minister. There would be no equivalent to Sully, Richelieu, or Mazarin for the rest of his reign. Soon after Mazarin's death, Louis had the ambitious finance minister Fouquet, who had hoped to dominate the government, arrested, and his lavish estate confiscated. Impressed by the architect and garden designer who had created Fouquet's palace at Vaux-le-Vicomte, Louis later hired them to create his own palace at Versailles.

Although Louis XIV tried to oversee all aspects of the government, he did rely on ministers for assistance in carrying out his policies. The fate of Fouquet had shown these men, however, that they could not aspire to personal dominance in the style of Richelieu and Mazarin. Louis was careful to divide his favor among competing ministers and encourage rivalries among them, so that he would always be in a position to make the decisions that mattered.

The most important minister in the first half of Louis XIV's reign was Colbert, a former assistant of Mazarin's. Colbert is remembered above all for his efforts to regulate the French economy. He believed that an organized effort was needed to allow France to surpass its rivals, particularly the Netherlands and England. French merchants and manufacturers were strictly regulated to avoid what Colbert regarded as wasteful competition and to make sure that their goods were of high quality. Colbert tried to encourage the development of domestic manufactures to replace goods that France had had to import from abroad, especially expensive luxury products. His mercantilist policies discouraged imports through high tariffs and tried to build up export industries whose sales abroad would increase the amount of money flowing into the kingdom.

Building up France's economy was just one part of Louis XIV's program for increasing the country's power. In his view, the most important duty of a ruler was to seek gloire (glory) for himself and his country through military successes. The war minister, Louvois, was put in charge of organizing an army that soon grew to be Europe's largest. In 1665, Louis XIV launched an attack on the Spanish provinces in the Netherlands, along France's northern borders. This War of Devolution (1666-68) added the important city of Lille to French territory. In 1672, France attacked the Netherlands, an important commercial rival. The French expected an easy victory over their much smaller opponent, but the Dutch succeeded in finding allies and put up a stiff resistance. Although Louis XIV's propagandists proclaimed the war a triumph, in fact it ended in 1678 with only minor gains for France.

At home, Louis XIV continued his efforts to strengthen royal power. He systematized Richelieu's method of controlling the provinces through appointed officials by creating a system of permanent intendants, one for each of the country's provinces. The intendants, who could be moved or dismissed by the king, oversaw the enforcement of laws and the collection of taxes, and reported regularly to the king about events in their province. French subjects became accustomed to the permanent presence of royal authority throughout the country. In 1673, Louis curtailed the powers of the parlements, the royal courts. They were forbidden to protest against the provisions of new laws until after they had registered them. This greatly reduced the courts' ability to obstruct royal policy and influence the population.

Although he was determined to be obeyed, Louis XIV understood that he needed cooperation from his subjects to carry out his policies. He offered the country's noble elites a virtual monopoly on government offices and favors in exchange for their support. In France's towns, elected city councils were replaced with officials named by the king, who could be counted on to give him their loyalty. To raise money, he created and sold an ever-increasing number of venal offices. Louis XIV distrusted the lower classes, viewing them as a potential source of disorder. He created large hopitaux (hospices) where beggars, orphans, criminals and the insane were forcibly locked up under tight supervision.

Like his predecessors Henri IV and Louis XIII, Louis XIV wanted to see France achieve religious unity. Although he was a devout Catholic, he resented the Pope's efforts to control the French Church. In 1682, he imposed the Gallican articles on the French hierarchy, giving the king almost total control over the naming of bishops and the internal affairs of the church. Urged on by militant Catholics who convinced him that the Protestant minority was too weak to resist, Louis decided in 1685 that the time had come to revoke the edict of Nantes. Protestant worship in France was forbidden, and drastic measures, such as quartering troops in Protestant homes, were used to pressure them to convert. About one-third of France's Protestants fled abroad to escape this persecution; others formed an underground movement, holding religious services in forests and remote mountain areas. The Protestant exiles waged a propaganda campaign against Louis XIV from their refuges in the Netherlands and elsewhere, significantly damaging the king's reputation abroad.

Throughout the early 1680s, Louis XIV continued his aggressive drive to expand France's borders, particularly along the Rhine river. The annexation of the historically German city of Strasbourg in 1681 gave him control of the strategic province of Alsace. France's push toward the Rhine brought Louis XIV into conflict with the Austrian Habsburg dynasty, but Emperor Leopold I was distracted by a war against the Ottoman Empire, whose armies threatened his capital of Vienna in 1683. Although the Austrians were fellow Christians, Louis XIV encouraged the Turks, further poisoning relations with the Habsburgs.

Once the Austrians had defeated the Turks, they joined an alliance with France's other enemies. Leadership of this coalition came from the Dutch leader William of Orange, who became king of England in 1688 as William III, replacing James II who Louis XIV had supported. In 1688, France found itself involved in a new round of warfare against an alliance that included all the other major European powers: England, the Netherlands, Austria, and Prussia. Huguenot exiles driven out of France after 1685 waged an effective propaganda campaign against Louis XIV. The war of the League of Augsburg lasted until 1697. The death of the capable war minister Louvois in 1691 deprived Louis of a valuable advisor. Although the French won some major battles, Louis XIV was unable to break up the enemy coalition, and the final peace settlement was a barely disguised defeat for him.

The war of the League of Augsburg left France financially exhausted, and the aging king was not eager to start another conflict. When Charles II, the king of Spain, died without an heir in 1700 and left his throne to a French Bourbon prince, however, Louis found himself in a dilemma. France's enemies refused to accept an arrangement that they feared would some day lead to a union of France and Spain. Louis was unwilling to renounce such a significant gain in France's diplomatic and military position. Negotiations with William III and Leopold I broke down, and in 1701 France again found itself at war with the British, Dutch, and Austrians.

The war of the Spanish Succession (1701-1713) was the largest and costliest European war up to that time. At its height, the French army grew to more than 400,000 men, three times as large as it had been during the Thirty Years' War. The cost of maintaining this huge war effort was crippling. Taxes increased to record levels. The king's effort to increase the capitation, a tax paid by all subjects regardless of their social status, put a strain on the alliance with the nobility that had been the basis of Louis's system. Protestants in the remote southern region of the Cévennes revolted in 1703, starting a guerilla war that became an additional drain on resources. The French army also suffered several major defeats, most notably at the battle of Blenheim in 1704, when the British forces commanded by the Duke of Marlborough won a devastating victory.

The disasters of the war generated increasing criticism of Louis XIV and his heavy-handed absolutist system. Merchants and manufacturers complained about the rules and regulations that hindered their activities. At the court, many high nobles resented their exclusion from any real political role and talked about the necessity of reducing the excessive powers Louis XIV had gathered into his hands. One unhappy noble, the duc de Saint-Simon, documented their complaints in his extensive diaries. His acid portrait of the aging king and his faction-ridden court was published after his and the king's death, and has become both a literary classic and the source of much of our knowledge about French politics and opinion under Louis XIV.

Devout Catholics objected to a church that had become an instrument of political control; some of them joined a dissident Catholic movement, Jansenism, that called for a purer, stricter form of piety. Fearing that the Jansenists would weaken his authority over the church, Louis XIV pressured the Pope to issue a condemnation of their theological doctrines. The Pope's bull, Unigenitus, issued in 1713, only strengthened the Jansenists' determination to resist both Papal and royal authority. The Jansenist controversy would become one of the major divisions in France during the eighteenth century.

French fortunes reached their low point in 1709, following more military defeats. The winter of 1709-1710 was one of the coldest in French history, destroying crops and reducing much of the population to utter misery. Louis XIV was by now ready to make peace, but his enemies kept raising their demands as they saw France's difficulties mounting. Unwilling to accept demands that he regarded as humiliating for himself and dangerous for the country, Louis was driven to take the extraordinary step of appealing directly to his subjects for their support. "I come to ask for your councils and your aid in this encounter that involves your safety," he told them.

Divisions among France's enemies and better fortunes on the battlefield finally made it possible to bring the war to an end in 1713. The Bourbon Philip V remained king of Spain, but renounced any claim to the French throne, and France avoided having to cede territory gained earlier in Louis's reign. The war left France on the verge of bankruptcy, however, and the aged king was deeply unpopular. In the meantime, the death of his son and grandson during the last years of the war had left a young great-grandson as heir, raising the prospect of another troubled regency. Louis XIV's attempt to ensure the survival of the dynasty by making his illegitimate sons eligible for the throne further alienated key court figures. At his death in 1715, Louis XIV left behind a deeply troubled kingdom. His critics hoped that France would now move in the direction of a less centralized government with a less aggressive foreign policy.

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The Reign of Louis XIV (1643-1715): An Overview

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Born in 1638, Louis XIV succeeded his father, Louis XIII, as king at the age of five. He ruled for 72 years, until his death in 1715, making his reign the longest of any European monarch. By the time he died, he outlived his son and his grandson, leaving the throne to his young great-grandson Louis XV.