The Art of Kingship: Louis XIV, A Reconsideration | History Today - 0 views
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On June 7th, 1654, Louis XIV was crowned in the traditional manner at the cathedral of Reims
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The minority had ended at rather an early age, but kings of France were not as ordinary men, in that, among other things, they had the capacity of coming of age prematurely
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For ten years after he had come of age Louis XIV left the government in the hands of Mazarin, apparently willingly
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Louis never forgot the flight from Paris or the humiliations inflicted on his childhood by the Fronde. Saint-Simon said that he often spoke of those times with bitterness, even telling how he was so neglected that one evening he had been pulled dripping out of the fountain in the Palais Royal, where he had fallen and been left to lie. The lesson he drew from the Fronde was that the king must be absolute
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A population of some twenty millions, when England or Spain had under five and the largest German states barely one or two millions, was, given able generals and domestic unity, a guarantee of military success. But such a cautious monarch as Louis did not fling himself into a course of foreign conquest without preparation
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A king was in those days still primarily a great landowner and his first aim was to add to the extent of the lands possessed by his dynasty. In this sense the state was identified with the monarch and this was the meaning of I’Etat e’est moi. Louis XIV put the position quite clearly himself: “In working for the state, the monarch is working for himself; the good of the one is the glory of the other; when the former is happy, noble and powerful, he who has brought this about is glorious.
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An Italian visitor compared Louis XIV leaving his chateau, surrounded by body-guards, carriages, horses, courtiers, valets, to the Queen bee when she takes flight into the fields with her swarm
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The Queen died about this time; and Louis, who by now was wanting to settle down, married Mme Scarron secretly
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Versailles, court, etiquette, mistresses, were all part of the ornamental framework of monarchy, but Louis XIV was no mere playboy king. His pride was in his mastery of what he called the metier de roi, and it is important to note what this meant, because it has sometimes been given too extensive an interpretation
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It was natural that Louis XIV should devote his attention above all to foreign affairs, but it was with his characteristic moderation and sense of the possible that he began his career of conquest
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Given this, and a King like Louis XIV to play the central role, it became the scene of something like a perpetual ballet performed before an audience of twenty millions
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The devastating invasion of a German state was calculated to do so, and in this sense it succeeded, but only at a price
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Under Louis XIV the higher nobility were domesticated at Court and ceased to be even a nuisance. Robbed of their leadership, the lesser nobles and gentry—of course they did not come to Versailles, as is sometimes implied, there would not have been standing room if they had—could safely be left to rot in idleness in their chateaux and manor-houses. With one exception Louis had no minister of noble birth throughout his reign
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Under Louis XIV the royal bureaucracy, which had been so many centuries in the growing, reached its apogee
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If the Catholics were loyal, the Huguenots were not less so. It almost seemed as if there were a competition which religion could elevate the King on a higher altar
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In the cause of religion Louis XIV had lost, as Sorel put it, more than he could have gained by the most victorious war or than could have been demanded by his enemies as the price of the most disastrous peace
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He had seen a whole generation of his subjects pass away. Within a few months, in 1711, his son, his grandson and his elder great-grandson all died, leaving only a weak baby to carry on the Bourbon dynasty
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The last of the agreements was signed in November 1715, but the King of France had died at Versailles on September 1st, at the age of seventy-seven and in the fifty-sixth year of his personal rule
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The sun king had gone down not in splendour but amid clouds of foreign defeat and domestic distress, to be succeeded, against his will and testament, not by his bastard Maine, whom he loved, but by Philip of Orleans, whom he hated. The Regent was to try to put the clock back, to undo the work of the great monarch in every field. In foreign policy, religion, government, finance, the Regency was an attempt at revolution from above
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Three-quarters of a century after Louis XIV had died the monarchy which had reached its height, and been given its final majestic proportions under him, came crashing down in ruins; and in this case it is just to tax the architect with ill-matched aims
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Every time the King creates an office, it was said, God creates a fool to buy it. In fact, the purchasers were not quite so foolish as the saying suggests
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Finally, it must be said that Louis XIV had not even successfully completed his especial task of securing the emancipation of the monarchy from the danger of a future Fronde. He had bound the noblesse to the Crown, but he had equally bound the Crown to the privileged orders. If Louis XIV was the master of his Court, his successors were to be the dependants of their own courtiers. Parlements, provincial estates still remained; and, powerless under a strong king, they were to be a menace under weak ones. The wheel came full circle in 1787 with the révolte nobiliaire, when the last Fronde began the revolution against Louis XVI, and the privileged orders destroyed the absolute monarchy, though in doing so they also destroyed themselves