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manhefnawi

Charles XIV John | king of Sweden and Norway | Britannica.com - 0 views

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Sweden Bernadotte Napoleon Gustave IV

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  • original name Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte
  • French Revolutionary general and marshal of France (1804), who was elected crown prince of Sweden (1810), becoming regent and then king of Sweden and Norway (1818–44).
  • formed Swedish alliances with Russia, Great Britain, and Prussia, which defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Leipzig (1813)
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • he enlisted in the French army
  • supporter of the Revolution
  • Bernadotte first met Napoleon Bonaparte in 1797 in Italy. Their relationship, at first friendly, was soon embittered by rivalries and misunderstandings
  • In November 1799 Bernadotte refused to assist Bonaparte’s coup d’état that ended the Directory but neither did he defend it
  • When, on May 18, 1804, Napoleon proclaimed the empire, Bernadotte declared full loyalty to him and, in May, was named marshal of the empire
  • he was invited to become crown prince of Sweden. In 1809 a palace revolution had overthrown King Gustav IV of Sweden and had put the aged, childless, and sickly Charles XIII on the throne. The Danish prince Christian August had been elected crown prince but died suddenly in 1810, and the Swedes turned to Napoleon for advice.
  • he respected his military ability, his skillful and humane administration of Hanover and the Hanseatic towns, and his charitable treatment of Swedish prisoners in Germany
  • Bernadotte was elected Swedish crown prince. On October 20 he accepted Lutheranism and landed in Sweden; he was adopted as son by Charles XIII and took the name of Charles John (Karl Johan). The Crown Prince at once assumed control of the government and acted officially as regent during the illnesses of Charles XIII. Napoleon now tried to prevent any reorientation of Swedish foreign policy and moreover sent an immediate demand that Sweden declare war on Great Britain
  • Charles John was anxious to achieve something for Sweden that would prove his worth to the Swedes and establish his dynasty in power. He could, as many Swedes wished, have regained Finland from Russia, either by conquest or by negotiation
  • the conquest of Norway from Denmark, based on a Swedish alliance with Napoleon’s enemies. An alliance was signed with Russia in April 1812, with Great Britain in March 1813—with the British granting a subsidy for the proposed conquest of Norway—and with Prussia in April 1813. Urged by the allies, however, Charles John agreed to take part in the great campaign against Napoleon and to postpone his war with Denmark. The Crown Prince landed his troops at Stralsund, Ger., in May 1813 and soon took command of the allied army of the north
  • conserve his forces for the war with Denmark, and the Prussians bore the brunt of the fighting
  • After the decisive Battle of Leipzig (October 1813), Napoleon’s first great defeat, Charles John succeeded in defeating the Danes in a swift campaign and forced King Frederick VI of Denmark to sign the Treaty of Kiel (January 1814), which transferred Norway to the Swedish crown. Charles John now had dreams of becoming king or “protector” of France, but he had become alienated from the French people, and the victorious allies would not tolerate another soldier in charge of French affairs
  • Charles John conducted an efficient and almost bloodless campaign, and in August the Norwegians signed the Convention of Moss, whereby they accepted Charles XIII as king
  • At the Congress of Vienna (1814–15), Austria and the French Bourbons were hostile to the upstart prince, and the son of the deposed Gustav was a potential pretender to the throne. But, thanks to Russian and British support, the status of the new dynasty was undisturbed
  • Upon the death of Charles XIII on Feb. 5, 1818, Charles John became king of Sweden and Norway, and the former republican and revolutionary general became a conservative ruler.
  • His foreign policy inaugurated a long and favourable period of peace, based on good relations with Russia and Great Britain
manhefnawi

The Afterlife of Henry of Navarre | History Today - 0 views

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Bourbon King Navarre Louis XIV Henry IV XIII

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  • the very survival of the first Bourbon king amid the dangers and conspiracies of his time suggests a certain element of rational calculation, if not outright hypocrisy.
  • Navarre were established during his own lifetime
  • In 1594 Jean Boucher, the most influential curé among the revolutionary leaders of the Leaguer Sixteen, launched an attack upon the hypocrisy of the king’s conversion fully as personal and venomous as his earlier indictment of the last Valois, Henri III
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • in terms comparable with the later self-promoting propaganda arranged for his grandson, Louis XIV
  • It was, however, to the legendary hero that all sides appealed after his death in the troubles of the regencies of his second wife, Marie de Médicis, and then of Anne of Austria, the widow of his son, Louis XIII
  • In the 1660 Parisian entry ceremony for Louis XIV, it was the twenty-two year-old king who replaced his ancestor as Hercules on a triumphal arch
  • His attitude to the legend of Henri IV was more a matter of personal judgement than of any desire to flatter Louis XIV. His Histoire de France began to be published soon after the death of Louis XIII in 1643, and reached the year 1598 in 1651
  • Navarre’s great-grandson, the regent Philippe d’Orléans, who promoted his ancestor’s memory in the belief that he closely resembled him in appearance and character.
  • Navarre, as it had been for Louis XIV after the latter’s death.
  • Hence Henry of Navarre could appear an exemplary figure of a king of proto-Enlightenment.
  • Henri IV could be understood both as the product of his experience and of his inherent qualities of courage and sensibility.
  • in assessing Henry of Navarre he felt obliged to say: ‘Here the legend is nothing more than history; here fiction can add nothing to truth’.
manhefnawi

Marie de Médicis as Queen and Regent of France | History Today - 0 views

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France Valois Queen Regent Louis XIII Political Henry IV

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  • mother of the last Valois Kings
  • preserve the authority of the monarchy through the years of its degradation
  • Médicis Queen entered the capital as the prospective mother of the new Bourbon dynasty
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • As complaisant royal consort and then as Regent of France, Marie de Médicis was called upon to play a role resembling that of her distant cousin
  • Ferdinando, who renounced his cardinalate to assume the ducal dignity, reversed his brother’s policies, and invested his ducats in the struggle of Henry IV, the Bourbon King of France, against the Spanish-supported Catholic League
  • Negotiations for marriage with a number of Italian and German suitors of princely rank were inconclusive, and, as the financial obligations of the French monarchy to Florentine creditors increased, so, too, did the probability of a French husband for Marie de Médicis
  • A more promising expedient to recover or reduce a bad debt seemed to be the marriage of his niece with the French King
  • Papal authority was needed to annul Henry IV’s marriage with Marguerite de Valois, the wayward daughter of Catherine de Médicis
  • the marriage contract was signed in Tuscany
  • The kingdom that received Marie de Médicis as its Queen had been torn by four decades of civil war.
  • The imposition of peace in itself had created the conditions for economic recovery, but the monarchy appreciated that it had a positive task to heal and to restore.
  • Sully had served his master when he had been no more than a petty King of Navarre, had fought beside him in a score of engagements, and, though a Huguenot
  • Some of the weaknesses shown by Marie de Médicis may be condoned in the light of her husband’s conduct. The King treated her with courtesy and, intermittently, with a familiar affection
  • Henry IV’s domestic life was likened to that of the Grand Turk. He expected his Queen and his mistresses to live in harmony
  • Her half-brother, Charles d’Auvergne, the natural son of the Valois King, Charles IX, and her father, Francois de Balzac d’Entragues
  • Her marriage with Henry IV, the prelude to the massacre of St. Bartholomew in 1572, had been as farcical in later years as it had been tragic in its origin
  • Henry IV allied himself with Savoy against Spain, and proposed to intervene against the Catholic Emperor
  • Regency by declaring the tearful Queen-Mother sole Regent in the minority of Louis XIII
  • France turned towards alliance with Henry IV’s Spanish enemies
  • Marie de Médicis, lacking the authority of Henry IV, had now to contend with the ambitions he had held in check. She could no longer afford the peevish indolence she had affected as Queen: she had to devote all her energy to conciliating and balancing the forces that threatened to curtail her power
  • A proposal to affirm the Spanish alliance by the dual marriage of the King and his sister, Elizabeth, with the Spanish Haps-burgs provoked this response
  • Conflicts between the three orders enabled Marie de Médicis and her Ministers to survive these challenges
  • In the following year a desultory campaign against Nevers was complicated by a war between Spain and Savoy, in which, despite the insistence of the government upon the sincerity of the Spanish alliance, a French army under the command of Henry IV’s old general, Lesdiguieres, marched into Italy against the Hapsburgs
  • The Queen Mother was placed under arrest and exiled to Blois. Her confidante, Leonora Galigaï, was put on trial for peculation and sorcery, and condemned to death on both counts
  • the princess Elizabeth crossed the Bidassoa and, in exchange, Anne of Austria became the bride of Louis XIII
  • If her roles as Queen and Regent had resembled those of Catherine de Médicis, her actions after her fall seemed bent upon the destruction of all that her predecessor had represented
  • It was her tragedy that she failed to identify her personal ambitions with the symbolic meaning of the crown she wore
Javier E

H-Net Reviews - 0 views

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arms race WWI origins militarism history europe

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  • Javier E on 27 Oct 16
     
    David G. Herrmann. The Arming of Europe and the Making of the First World War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. xiii + 307 S. $39.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-691-03374-7. Reviewed by John Keiger
manhefnawi

Papa and his Brood: Henry IV of France | History Today - 0 views

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Henry IV Children Foreign Policies

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  • Henry IV of France was an engagingly flamboyant monarch, famous for his vitality and wit, his forcefulness and determination
  • Accepting the heavy responsibilities of his crown, he used or planned to use his offspring to strengthen the Bourbon monarchy
  • As Henry’s marriage with Marguerite de Valois (the occasion of the massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day) proved childless and was annulled, his legitimate line derived from his second wife, Marie de Médicis.
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  • The King’s delight in his children was boundless, and his affection recognized no distinction between legitimate and illegitimate
  • he recognized the political significance of the eldest legitimate son in an hereditary monarchy, and as a matter of course the Dauphin was accorded special status. The King knew well the importance of forging personal ties between the sovereign and his people, and at the age of one month the future Louis XIII was introduced to public life:
  • Henry’s premature death ended César’s role in government; lacking his royal father’s support, he was reduced instantly to that anomalous status attendant upon a former monarch’s illegitimate offspring. During the reign of his half-brother he was naturally a rebel against the Crown
  • Jeanne-Baptiste de Bourbon and Marie-Henriette de Bourbon suffered the usual fate of unmarriageable daughters; they were relegated to convents
  • Throughout the last decade of Henry’s reign, speculation centred around the ‘Spanish marriages,’ a system of alliances
  • These schemes were encouraged by the Pope, who wished to unite the two great Catholic powers of Europe; and the Queen herself (who was half-Habsburg) voiced approval of alliance with Spain.
  • Her marriage to the Dauphin would have incorporated Lorraine in the French crown by peaceful annexation, strengthening France’s north-eastern frontier
  • The contract, signed a few weeks before the King’s murder, provided for an offensive and defensive league against Spain in which Henry agreed to support Savoy’s claims to Milan
  • Henry’s assassination in May of 1610 left Marie de Médicis Regent of a kingdom poised for attack against the forces of Austria and Spain, and she scrambled frantically to extricate France from the anti-Habsburg coalition without leaving herself diplomatically isolated. Charles Emmanuel of Savoy finally agreed to accept the younger princess, Christine, as his son’s bride
  • Thus Elisabeth was available for another alliance, and the long-discussed ‘Spanish match’ was realized in a double marriage in 1615: Louis XIII received the Infanta as his wife and Elisabeth went to Spain as the bride of the future Philip IV
  • In order to win Habsburg good will, the Regent had sacrificed the advantages of a match with Lorraine
manhefnawi

Louis XIII | king of France | Britannica.com - 0 views

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Second Bourbon King of France

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  • Louis succeeded to the throne upon the assassination of his father in May 1610
  • As part of her policy of allying France with Spain, she arranged the marriage (November 1615) between Louis and Anne of Austria, daughter of the Spanish king Philip III.
  • break the hegemony of the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs
magnanma

Palace of Versailles: Facts & History | Live Science - 0 views

www.livescience.com/-versailles-facts-history.html

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  • Located about 10 miles (16 kilometers) southwest of Paris, the palace is beside the settlement of Versailles. The town was little more than a hamlet before becoming the seat of royal power. By the time of the French Revolution, it had a population of more than 60,000 people, making it one of the largest urban centers in France.
  • France's kings were first attracted to Versailles because of the area's prolific game. Louis XIII, who lived 1601-1643, bought up land, built a chateau and went on hunting trips.
  • The chateau Louis XIII built was little more than a hunting lodge having enough space to house the king and a small entourage. It was his successor, Louis XIV (1638-1715), the "Sun King," a ruler who chose the sun as his emblem and believed in centralized government with the king at its center, who would radically transform Versailles making it the seat of France's government by the time of his death.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Spawforth notes that the palace contained about 350 living units varying in size, from multi-room apartments to spaces about the size of an alcove. The size and location of the room a person got depended on their rank and standing with the king. While the crown prince (known as the dauphin) got a sprawling apartment on the ground floor, a servant may have nothing more than a space in an attic or a makeshift room behind a staircase.
  • Scholars have suggested a number of factors that led him to build a great palace complex at Versailles and move the French government there. It's been noted that by keeping the king's residence some distance from Paris, it offered him protection from any civil unrest going on in the city. It also forced the nobles to travel to Versailles and seek lodging in the palace, something that impeded their ability to build up regional power bases that could potentially challenge the king.
  • A series of gardens, created in a formal style, stood to the west of the palace (one of them today is in the shape of a star) and contained sculptures as well as the pressurized fountains capable of launching water high into the air. The formality and grandeur of the gardens symbolized Louis XIV's absolute power, even over nature
  • Despite the richness of the palace, the kings had to make do with makeshift theaters up until 1768 when Louis XV allowed the building of the royal opera. It contained a mechanism that allowed the orchestra level to be raised to the stage allowing it to be used for dancing and banqueting. Spawforth notes that the opera required 3,000 candles to be burned for opening night and was rarely used due to its cost and the poor shape of France's finances.
  • After the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette would be stripped of power, brought to Paris and ultimately beheaded. The palace fell under the control of the new republican government.Many of its furnishings were sold to help pay for the subsequent Revolutionary Wars. When Napoleon came to power, he had an apartment created for himself in the Grand Trianon, complete with a map room.
  • In 1871, after France had lost a war against Prussia, Kaiser Wilhelm I was proclaimed Emperor of Germany in the Hall of Mirrors, adding an extra layer of humiliation to the French defeat. For several years after this defeat, the situation in France was so bad that its Chamber of Deputies and Senate opted to meet at Versailles, rather than Paris, for reasons of safety.
  • Today, Versailles is one of the most-visited sites in France. Visitors are drawn to its architectural grandeur, the stunning water features (concerts are often played in the gardens during the summer) and its sense of history. 
manhefnawi

General Franco and the Spanish Succession | History Today - 0 views

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1957 Spanish Succession Alfonso Franco Juan Carlos

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  • The days of Bourbon rule in Spain seemed to be at an end when King Alfonso XIII left the country in 1931
  • abdicating in favour of his third son Don Juan, Count of Barcelona
  • The Civil War of 1936-39 left Spain a fascist dictatorship run by General Franco as El Caudillo (the Leader)
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • he enjoyed being dictator and had no intention of giving way to any monarch
  • In the following year Spain was officially proclaimed a monarchy with Franco as head of state and the power to choose his successor
  • the monarchy would be restored on General Franco’s death or retirement, but without saying who the monarch would be
  • The destinies of Spain will be directed,’ the parliament was told, ‘by a monarchy which is neither liberal nor absolute, but traditional, popular and Catholic
  • You’ve got all three Bourbons in front of you,’ she told Franco. ‘Decide!’ The general made no reply, but early in the following year Juan Carlos made it clear that in his opinion, when the time came, the monarchy would be ‘installed’ rather than ‘restored’
  • When Franco died in Madrid in 1975 at the age of eighty-two, Juan Carlos was duly installed as King of Spain
manhefnawi

The Murder of le roi Henri | History Today - 0 views

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Henry IV Assassination Religion Huguenot Navarre Heir III

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  • The queen of France, Marie de’ Medici, had been crowned the previous day at the basilica of Saint Denis and was due to make her formal entry into the capital.
  • French queens were not crowned as a matter of course and Henry IV, king of France since 1589, saw no reason to go to the expense of a coronation for his second queen whom he had married in 1610
  • The alarm was shared by France, which had been at war with the Habsburg empire for much of the 16th century. Religion was also involved, as the Catholic Habsburgs were opposed by many German Protestant princes. Henry IV was urged to intervene militarily, but he had hesitated initially.
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  • At a series of council meetings in February 1610 the king and his ministers planned to invade Flanders in the spring
  • Henry IV was visiting his mistress, Gabrielle d’Estrées, at the Hôtel Schomberg in Paris when Chastel drew his knife, wounding him in the lip.Chastel did not try to escape, confessed and was duly executed
  • There was also much pointing of fingers after Henry IV’s assassination
  • Had they not been responsible for the assassination of William the Silent, Prince of Orange, in 1584 and for the Gunpowder Plot in England in 1605? They were also seen as the hidden force that had inspired Jacques Clément, the Jacobin friar who had fatally stabbed Henry III in 1589
  • Henry IV is remembered as one of the most popular kings of France
  • The Edict of Nantes of April 1598 is commonly seen, albeit inaccurately, as an act of toleration that enabled Catholics and Protestants to live side by side in peace.
  • It was in 1584 on the death of François Duke of Anjou, the younger brother of Henry III, that Henry, king of Navarre became heir presumptive to the French throne. Under Salic Law, women were debarred from the line of succession, but the situation was not clear-cut, for the king of France had always been a Catholic and Henry of Navarre was a Huguenot
  • chose a rival candidate in the person of the old and ineffectual Cardinal Charles de Bourbon
  • When Henry III, who was childless, was himself assassinated in 1589 the succession problem became acute. Though Henry of Navarre was rightfully heir under the Salic Law, as a Protestant he had literally to fight his way to the throne
  • Following the death of the Cardinal of Bourbon in 1590, whom the Leaguers had acclaimed as King Charles X, they toyed with the idea of setting aside the Salic Law and having a Spanish Infanta, Isabella Clara Eugenia, as queen
  • Even after he had made peace with Spain (in 1598) and Savoy (in 1601), their rulers continued to stir up trouble among the great nobles in France
  • Coming to terms with Spain, she married off her son, the boyking Louis XIII, to a Spanish princess, Anne, the daughter of Philip II of Spain
manhefnawi

Voltaire and the Massacre of St Bartholomew | History Today - 0 views

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France Catherine de Medici Christianity ST Bartholomew

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  • Henry of Navarre
  • Mahomet II conquered Constantinople
  • One section of the citizens of Paris massacred the rest on Saint Bartholomew’s night
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • to check the drift to war, but her success was uncertain
  • The peace of Saint-Germain in August 1570 held some prospect of permanence, since the house of Orange, leading resistance to Spain in the Netherlands
  • Although the Queen Mother, Catherine de Medici, had conferred in 1565 with Philip II’s lieutenant, the Duke of Alba, the close association of the French Crown with Spain had been broken by the death of her daughter, Philip’s Queen, in 1568
  • crossed the frontier to assist the rebels, and by mid-summer the French government was on the brink of open war with Spain
  • a majority opposed Coligny’s policy of foreign war to ensure domestic peace, but the decision lay with the King, and the ascendancy Coligny had established over Charles IX suggested he would opt for war
  • Catherine initiated the train of events that led to the massacre. Elizabeth of England, who had no wish to see France in control of the Netherlands, informed Alba that she did not regard the Anglo-French treaty as committing her to war, and Alba passed this information to Catherine. The Huguenot armies sustained severe setbacks, and the Queen Mother persuaded herself that war at this time would end in disaster
  • Associated with these conscious motives was her bitter resentment at being replaced in her son’s confidence by Admiral Coligny
  • This plan seems to have remained in Catherine de Medicis’ mind as an alternative for use in an emergency. In all the frantic discussions of August 23rd it involved no more than the killing of the inner circle of Protestant nobles, the young Bourbon princes, Navarre and Condé, excepted
  • Saint Bartholomew’s day had been prepared two whole years in advance. It was a day when one section of the nation slaughtered another; when the assassins pursued their victims under the very beds and even into the arms of princesses who vainly tried to intercede [a reference to the memoirs of Marguerite de Valois]; when Charles IX himself fired from a window of the Louvre upon those of his subjects who had escaped the butchers
  • The massacre became a general slaughter because the Crown needed a military force strong enough to ensure success.
  • When Henry of Guise, who had pursued a group of escaping Huguenots, returned to the city, the King was obliged to accept public responsibility for the counter-blow to the alleged Protestant plot
  • Belief in a diabolical and long-standing deception on the part of Charles IX and his mother became widespread soon after the massacre
  • The joy with which Philip II and Pope Gregory XIII welcomed the news confirmed Protestant suspicion of the complicity of Madrid and Rome
  • The age of Louis XIV, into which Voltaire was born, witnessed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the persecution of Catholic Jansenists and Quietists as well as of Huguenots
  • During the Regency that followed the death of Louis XIV in 1715 there was a need for another kind of hero to replace the Sun King’s tarnished military glory and record of religious persecution. Voltaire chose Louis’ grandfather, Henry of Navarre, who had accepted Catholicism after the massacre, reverted to Protestantism on his escape from court in 1576, and found Paris worth the price of a mass seventeen years later. The King who had healed French divisions after the religious wars, and granted the edict of toleration that Louis XIV had revoked, seemed the perfect candidate
  • asserted that the Queen Mother planned the massacre at the time of the peace of Saint-Germain in 1570
  • the cynical bad faith of Catherine de Medici, the turbulence of the aristocracy, and the cruelty of popular fanaticism. The lesson was reiterated with little variation
  • Catherine de Medici ordered the massacres in the midst of the wedding celebrations, in circumstances of profound peace, and after the most solemn oaths. Frightful as they were - and wholly destructive to the good name of France-their memory must be perpetuated, so that those who are always ready to begin unhappy religious disputes may see to what excess a partisan spirit ultimately leads
  • The slaughter of the Huguenots was not the outcome of a skilfully contrived and long premeditated plan, but the passions of the time, the enormity of the act, and the assertions of those who claimed, or seemed to claim, foreknowledge of the event
  • Saint Bartholomew had accounted for about 90,000 martyrs
Javier E

FC95: The Age of Louis XIV, the "Sun King" (1643-1715) - The Flow of History - 2 views

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Louis XIV history france

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  • Introduction From 1643 to 1815 France dominated much of Europe's political history and culture.  Foreigners came to France, preferring it to the charms of their own homeland.  Even today, many still consider it the place to visit in Europe and the world.  In the 1600's and 1700's there was a good reason for this dominance: population.  France had 23,000,000 people in a strongly unified state compared to 5,000,000 in Spain and England, and 2,000,000 in the Dutch Republic and the largest of the German states.  This reservoir of humanity first reached for and nearly attained the dominance of Europe under Louis XIV, the "Sun King".
  • Louis' early life and reign (1643-61) Louis was born in 1638 and succeeded his father, Louis XIII, as king in 1643 at the age of five.  Luckily, another able minister and Richelieu's successor, Cardinal Mazarin, continued to run the government.  In 1648, encroachment by the government on the nobles' power, poor harvests, high taxes, and unemployed mercenaries plundering the countryside after the Thirty Years War led to a serious revolt known as the Fronde, named after the slingshot used by French boys.  Louis and the court barely escaped from Paris with their lives.  Although Mazarin and his allies crushed the rebels after five hard years of fighting (1648-53), Louis never forgot the fear and humiliation of having to run from the Parisian mob and fight for his life and throne against the nobles.  This bitter experience would heavily influence Louis' policies when he ruled on his own.
  • Louis XIV may not have said, "I am the state", but he ruled as if he had said it.  Louis was the supreme example of the absolute monarch, and other rulers in Europe could do no better than follow his example.  Although Louis wished to be remembered as a great conqueror, his first decade of active rule was largely taken up with building France's internal strength.  There are two main areas of Louis' rule we will look at here: finances and the army. Louis' finance minister, Jean Baptiste Colbert, was an astute businessman of modest lineage, being the son of a draper.  Colbert's goal was to build France's industries and reduce foreign imports.  This seventeenth century policy where a country tried to export more goods and import more gold and silver was known as mercantilism.  While its purpose was to generate revenue for the king, it also showed the growing power of the emerging nation state.  Colbert declared his intention to reform the whole financial structure of the French state, and he did succeed in reducing the royal debt by cutting down on the number of tax farms he sold and freeing royal lands from mortgage.  Colbert especially concentrated on developing France's economy in three ways.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Religion was one aspect of Louis' reign that illustrated the absolute nature of his monarchy quite well.  Louis himself was quite a pious Catholic, learning that trait from his mother.  However, in the spirit of the day, he saw religion as a department of state subordinate to the will of the king.  By the same token, not adhering to the Catholic faith was seen as treason. As a result, Louis gradually restricted the rights of the French Huguenots and finally, in 1685, revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had given them religious freedom since the end of the French Wars of Religion in 1598.  This drove 200,000 Huguenots out of France, depriving it of some of its most skilled labor.  Thus Louis let his political and religious biases ruin a large sector of France's economy.
  • Versailles Louis' religious faith was largely a superficial one attached to the elaborate ritual of the Catholic mass.  This love of ritual also showed itself in how Louis ran his court at his magnificent palace of Versailles, several miles outside of Paris.  Much of the reason for building Versailles goes back to the Fronde that had driven Louis from Paris as a young boy.  Ever since then, Louis had distrusted the volatile Paris mob and was determined to move the court away from the influence of that city.  Versailles was also the showpiece of Louis' reign, glorifying him as the Sun King with its magnificent halls and gardens.
  • Just as Louis's palace at Versailles dominated European culture during the late 1600's and early 1700's, his diplomacy and wars dominated Europeans political history.  As Louis himself put it: "The character of a conqueror is regarded as the noblest and highest of titles."  Interestingly enough, he never led his troops in battle except for overseeing a few sieges from a safe distance.
  • Louis' main goals were to expand France to its "natural borders": the Rhine, the Alps, and the Pyrenees.  This, of course, would make him enemies among the Dutch, Germans, Austrians, Spanish, and English.  Therefore, Louis' diplomacy had to clear the way to make sure he did not fight everyone at once.  For this purpose he skillfully used money to neutralize potential enemies (such as Charles II of England in the Secret Treaty of Dover) and extracted favorable terms from stalemate or losing situations.  But Louis could also make some fateful blunders to hurt his cause.  His obsessive hatred of the Dutch dominated his policy too much, as did his own self-confidence and arrogance in trying to publicly humiliate his enemies.  However, this just alarmed Louis' enemies more, especially the Dutch, Austrians, and English, who allied against Louis to preserve the balance of power.
  • Exhaustion on both sides finally led to the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713.  Louis' grandson took the throne of Spain and its American empire, but the French and Spanish thrones could not be united under one ruler.  Austria got the Spanish Netherlands to contain French aggression to the north.  Just as the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 had contained Hapsburg aggression, the Treaty of Utrecht contained French expansion.  Two years later Louis XIV was dead, with little to show for his vaunted ambitions as a conqueror except an exhausted economy and dissatisfied populace.
  • Results of Louis' reign The age of Louis XIV was important to European history for several reasons.  First of all, it saw the triumph of absolutism in France and continental Europe.  Versailles was a glittering symbol and example for other European rulers to follow.  Any number of German and East European monarchs modeled their states and courts after Louis XIV, sometimes to the point of financial ruin.  Second, Louis' wars showed the system of Balance of Power politics working better than ever.  French aggression was contained and the status quo was maintained.  All this had its price, since the larger sizes of the armies and the final replacement of the pike with the musket took European warfare to a new level of destruction.  Finally, Louis' reign definitely established France as the dominant power in Europe.  However, the cost was immense and left his successors a huge debt.  Ironically, the problems caused by Louis XIV's reign would help lead to the French Revolution in 1789 and the spread of democratic principles across Europe and eventually the world.
  • I am the state. — Voltaire, incorrectly quoting Louis XIV
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