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LOUIS XIV (FRANCE) (1638–1715; ruled 1643–1715)

LOUIS XIV (FRANCE) (1638–1715; ruled 1643–1715), king of France. Hailed as le Dieudonné, 'the God-given', Louis XIV was the first child of Louis XIII (1601–1643) and Anne of Austria (1601–1661), born twenty-three years into their marriage.

THE EARLY YEARS (1638–1661)

Ascending the throne at the age of four, Louis XIV was educated under the tutelage of his godfather and chief minister, Jules Cardinal Mazarin (1602–1661), and under the day-to-day watch of his governor, Nicolas de Neufville, first marshal-duke de Villeroi (1644–1730). The young king received not a scholarly education in the classics, but a practical education in history, diplomacy, war, and the arts, while his preceptor Hardouin de Péréfixe guided his spiritual development under the direction of the Queen Mother Anne, imbuing in Louis a distaste for heterodoxy, and associated disorder, of any kind. His formative experiences came during the Fronde (1648–1653), when he was directly awakened to the potential instability lurking in the kingdom as other forces sought to share in the crown's sovereign powers and remove Mazarin from the government and the kingdom. The events of these years, and Louis's exposure to the wider social and economic problems of France during his military progresses, taught him to mistrust the ambitions of peers and of senior princes of the blood and bred an awareness in him of the need for far tighter regulation of the leading institutions of the kingdom. The declaration of the young king's majority, two days after his thirteenth birthday on 7 September 1651, produced some rallying of support for the crown. But it was not until 1654, the year of the coronation (7 June), that the government reestablished military control over France. For the rest of the 1650s Mazarin led the government, while Henri de La Tour d'Auvergne, marshal-vîcomte de Turenne (1611–1675), trained the king in the art of war. In these years Mazarin did not involve Louis in the details of administration but did seek to keep him informed of developments, particularly on diplomatic and strategic issues, while encouraging him to establish his chivalric leadership of the kingdom.

THE REFORM OF GOVERNMENT AND FINANCES

By the time of Mazarin's death on 9 March 1661, Louis XIV had already shown himself to be an astute military commander, a skill that he would retain all the way up to his last personal campaign in 1693. He was also regarded as an excellent horseman, a noted conversationalist with an extraordinary memory for people, and, in the cultural sphere, a good musician and one of the very best dancers at court. Furthermore, he had been married to the Infanta Marie-Thérèse of Spain since June 1660 as part of the peace settlement of the Pyrenees, and she was now one month pregnant with the future dauphin (1661–1711). But Louis had little experience of governing, and it was expected that Mazarin would be succeeded as minister-favorite, most probably by Michel Le Tellier (1603–1685). What nobody anticipated was Louis's decision to assume control of the reins of government himself and his determination to maintain a grip on affairs (albeit a fluctuating grip) for the rest of his reign. Between March and September 1661 there was a minor revolution in French government during which the person of the king assumed center stage: the inner council (conseil d'en haut) was reduced in size to include only a handful of senior ministers whose advice was given candidly and accepted with almost perennial good grace. After the fall of Nicolas Fouquet (1615–1680), the surintendant of finances, there was greater transparency in financial transactions, with the king reserving to himself the right to approve every financial decision of the central government, even if successive controllers general of finance continued to dominate financial business.

Louis XIV did not favor major overhauls of the system of government that would unsettle the kingdom, but he was willing to entertain considerable administrative reforms insofar as they diminished disorder, encouraged stability, and enhanced his own regal power. Indeed, it is fair to say that some very dramatic changes occurred during his reign not through any increase in state bureaucracy but through changes in regulations and financial arrangements. Using the provincial intendants as a tool for preventing abuses and malpractice by the venal officeholders, Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683), as senior intendant of finances from September 1661 and then controller general from 1665 until his death in 1683, managed to bring the chaotic fiscal system of taxation and borrowing to its optimum efficacy. However, when the demands of war grew in the 1690s and 1700s and net revenue as a proportion of gross revenue declined once again to the dismal levels of the 1640s, two major reforms had to be introduced that did challenge the social basis of the country, undermining the entire system of lay privileged exemption from direct taxation. In 1695–1698 the capitation imposed a graduated poll tax upon all French subjects from the dauphin down, and this was reintroduced permanently in 1701. And then in 1710 the dixième, a tax of one-tenth of personal income regardless of status, was brought in, lasting until 1721.

THE ARMED FORCES

In spite of setbacks in the 1700s, the reforms of finance in an era of economic stagnation enabled the crown to sustain stronger and larger armed forces than ever before during Louis XIV's "personal rule." France had almost no navy to speak of in 1661 (ten warships and twelve frigates), but Colbert was immediately given the task of working with the grand master of navigation, the duke de Beaufort, to increase the number of vessels; and by the end of 1663 he had brought the galley fleet in the Mediterranean within his own orbit. The great leap forward in the size of the fleet and in administrative and port infrastructure came in the years 1669 to 1673, and in spite of the belief that Louis XIV lacked personal interest in the navy, he gave considerable support both to Colbert and then his son Seignelay in their efforts to create and maintain by 1689 the largest battle fleet in Europe. Only during the final years of the War of the League of Augsburg (1688–1697) after 1695, and during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) after 1705, did it prove impossible to sustain such a navy. The crown was consequently forced to rely much more on privateering at sea.

Louis took a far stronger interest in the reforms of the army. With the king's close involvement, Michel Le Tellier and particularly his son, the marquis de Louvois, gradually overhauled a highly complex system of regulations and financial structures to equip France with an army that, by 1693, stood at around 330,000 men. Their sheer attention to detail prevented on occasion what would otherwise have been a series of logistical breakdowns. That the extreme difficulties of the War of the Spanish Succession did not produce a military collapse can be attributed to the earlier structural and administrative reforms that had transformed the ramshackle forces of Louis's minority into, for all its defects, the most admired and feared army on the Continent.

FOREIGN POLICY

The developing army and navy of France were there essentially to enhance the interests of the Bourbon dynasty internationally, and French foreign policy was very much the king's own, albeit based on advice from his inner ministers. Throughout his reign Louis XIV aimed at securing for himself the most senior status among European princes in an age when the concept of an equality of sovereign states did not exist, and when most rulers pushed claims that others found outrageous at one time or another. In the first part of the "personal rule," between 1661 and 1674, Louis pursued a foreign policy of single-minded vainglory in a determined effort to facilitate further dismemberment of the Spanish Habsburg empire and, after 1668, reduce the United Provinces of the Netherlands to humble submission. But the failure to conquer the United Provinces, the entry of Emperor Leopold I (ruled 1658–1705) into the Dutch War in August 1673, a difficult winter in the Rhineland, and the subsequent French retreat into the southern Netherlands seems to have been a sobering experience for Louis, who after 1673–1674 sought to consolidate and strengthen his hold in and around Alsace while rebuilding and constructing anew a chain of fortifications on his northern and northeastern frontiers to defend against invasion. Such apparently defensive concerns were, however, not satisfied by the Treaty of Nijmegen in 1678, precipitating Louis over the following six years into highly aggressive seizures of strategically vital territory based on dubious legal title—the réunions—that antagonized German princes and drove them to seek support against France from the imperial Habsburg court in Vienna.

The growing influence of the Austrian Habsburgs within the Holy Roman Empire, both in Germany and northern Italy, in turn compelled Louis to engage from the early 1680s in heavy-handed political manipulation at smaller European courts to secure Bourbon influence and indirectly to protect the gains he had made and the status he now enjoyed as head of Europe's leading dynasty. Failing to entrench his territorial gains in the brief War of the Réunions (1683–1684), Louis, encouraged by Louvois, became increasingly anxious about growing Habsburg strength. In a desperate attempt to secure greater security for Alsace, in September 1688 Louis seized the key Rhine fortress of Philippsburg in the hope that this would force the empire to negotiate a definitive settlement of Rhineland territorial issues. Instead it precipitated the greatest conflict of the reign thus far. Having subsequently forced the Dutch Republic, Spain, and Great Britain also to declare war upon him between November 1688 and May 1689, Louis's insensitive attack on the interests of the duke of Savoy, Victor Amadeus II, a year later earned him another theater of operations he could ill afford. The pressure of the war by June 1693 forced Louis, under the influence of increasingly moderate and chastened advisors, to abandon his excessive demands and to consider returning most of the réunion territories to their owners; to negotiate with William III about his succession in Great Britain after the Glorious Revolution; and to make huge concessions to Savoy in order to neutralize Italy. Even so, over three more years of demanding and exhausting war were required, in the context of a catastrophic famine that pushed the French population down by perhaps 10 percent, before Savoy could be bought off in the Treaty of Turin (June 1696) and a general peace signed with France's other enemies at Ryswick (September and October 1697).

All this left France ill equipped to deal with the looming issue of the Spanish succession, as the ailing Charles II moved toward his death in November 1700. To try to avert war, Louis XIV and William III signed two successive partition treaties for the Spanish empire in October 1698 and March 1700, but Charles II himself wanted instead to maintain the unity of his territories, so the dying Spanish king willed them all to the one power that might be able to hold them together: France, in the person of Philippe, duke d'Anjou, second grandson of Louis XIV. A conflict with the Austrian Habsburgs was inevitable, but the decisions to seize fortresses in the Spanish Netherlands and exclude the British from the lucrative Spanish slave trade in the early spring of 1701 ensured that any war would once again include Britain and the United Provinces among the anti-French belligerents. France was pushed out of southern Germany and lost her Bavarian ally in 1704, and Philip V of Spain faced allied campaigning on the Iberian mainland from that year on. The Bourbons were expelled from northern Italy and Naples in 1706–1707 and from the southern Netherlands in 1708, while in 1709–1710 another somewhat less disastrous but still severe famine struck France. But the tide turned in 1710–1711 with Bourbon successes in Spain, and with changes of regime in Britain and Austria that affected the geostrategic considerations of the various powers. The War of the Spanish Succession consequently ended in 1713–1714 with France securing Spain itself and her overseas colonies for Philip V, while the Austrians received most of the rest of the Spanish European possessions, and Savoy was temporarily awarded Sicily.

Territorially, France emerged considerably larger and more secure from Louis XIV's reign, acquiring most notably Roussillon (1659), Franche-Comté (1674), and Alsace (1648 and 1678), as well as establishing serious colonies and trading posts in the Americas and western Africa. It is true that Louis XIV's foreign policies had brought hundreds of thousands of deaths, but this cannot be put down to a callous disregard for the fate of his own or foreign subjects. In fact, Louis was genuinely anxious to minimize casualties in warfare. But he was the most assertive and best-resourced individual in an international and cultural system that had an inbuilt tendency to resolve differences through arms, and in which its sovereign players could not afford to show too much understanding for the legitimate economic or dynastic interests of their rivals.

THE REGULATION OF A STATUS-BASED SOCIETY

A similar problem afflicted domestic state management during the mid- to late-seventeenth century. The rivalries of families and the personal ambitions of individuals, articulated in social and legal terms at all levels of the propertied hierarchy, militated against an easy resolution of disputes. Colbert's determined campaign in the 1660s to emphasize that all privileges and rights stemmed from the will of the king (and could be just as easily revoked) certainly helped to encourage a sense of strong royal authority in the legal sphere. This was aided by the 1665 Grands Jours investigations into lawless nobles and bandits in the Auvergne in tandem with the Parlement of Paris, and it was carried forward after 1679 by repeated edicts against dueling and in favor of litigation before royal officials to settle disputes. But Louis XIV had come to realize full well by 1661 that the instability of France was rooted primarily in her political culture. The Fronde was not the last gasp of a feudal noble class but a struggle for political and military precedence within the upper noble elites who, in the context of a breakdown in state finances during a royal minority, had no other choice but to assert their own status claims—backed up, if necessary, by military force.

Removing the exposed figure of a chief minister after 1661 was but a partial solution to the difficulties. Louis remained well aware that his ministers had their own private interests to further, and this was as much the case with court appointments, or military commands, as it was with architectural projects, so the active balancing of ministers and great nobility required considerable effort that this king was prepared to make. Far more likely to entrench political quiescence in the long run was a remodeling of the system of patronage and clientage and a concerted effort to break the automatic link between service and expectation of reward. Even if he still relied on other people's recommendations, by 1672 Louis insisted that virtually all military, naval, and ecclesiastical commissions come from his own person. Furthermore, by maintaining multiple channels of access to his person at court for different groups, families, and individuals, he ensured that no one faction or person (including ministers) could dominate his decisions over patronage. On top of this, he expanded the amount of largesse, both monetary and honorific, disbursed by the crown, while widening the pool of potential recipients. All this contributed to a serious dilution of the patronage power of individual grandees. With the partial exception of his own brother Orléans, for the most part the dukes, peers, and senior military officers now became patronage brokers for the crown rather than direct providers of opportunities for the lesser nobility. Always concerned for the future of the monarchy, Louis allied this policy of supervising patronage distribution with closely managing the upbringing of his offspring and descendants to an extreme extent in controlling their households. And if he made extensive military use of illegitimate princes (of his own body and those of his ancestors), he was loath to trust the erstwhile Frondeur branches of the Bourbon, the Condé and Conti, whose interests he encouraged only so far as was commensurate with the interests of the wider Bourbon dynasty. The aim in all this was to prevent another Fronde from ever happening again. Only at the very end of the reign, in 1714, when he had lost his son, two of his three grandsons (the dukes of Burgundy and Berry), and one of his great-grandsons to smallpox, did Louis XIV depart from the established dynastic rules when he wrote the bastard lines of the House of France into the succession. Although there was some sense in trying to avoid future succession wars by laying down an order of precedence in the event of the disappearance of all the legitimate Bourbon branches, this was bitterly resented by the great nobility and was overturned by the regent Philippe II, duc d'Orléans, in 1717.

HIGH CULTURE AND THE ARTS

The royal urge to preserve and impose order in the political field was also manifested in the arena of high culture. The growing presence of royal patronage in the arts and sciences after 1661 is better attributed to Colbert than the king himself, with the most notable advances being the foundation of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belle-Lettres in 1663 and the reform of the Academy of Painting and Sculpture the same year, followed by the foundation of the Academy of Sciences in 1666, and three years later that of the Royal Academy of Music. Moreover, between 1667 and 1672 Colbert oversaw the building of the Paris Observatory. Yet, if Colbert was the driving instrument who encouraged intellectuals and artists to view the crown as the foremost patron, it was Louis who set the tone and the taste and was the leading collector of objets d'art of his age. The king also took a very close interest in architectural projects, in particular the transformation of Versailles after 1669 from a relatively small hunting retreat to the largest palace complex in Europe by the mid-1680s. By and large Louis favored the classical over the baroque, in sculpture, architecture, and garden design, and in spite of the growing vogue for portraits of all manner of people, the king himself set great store by religious art.

RELIGION AND PUBLIC MORALITY

Louis XIV's preference for religious art was hardly surprising, for he was a devout Catholic, in spite of his several mistresses (most notably Louise de La Vallière [1644–1710] and Françoise, marquise de Montespan [1641–1707]) and the numerous bastards he fathered before 1680. Louis was sincere about protecting his subjects' souls and throughout his reign encouraged charitable giving. In 1693–1694, at the height of the famine, Pontchartrain, the controller general of finance, was ordered to organize grain imports from abroad and facilitate food transport within the country on a scale never previously attempted by France. But Louis was not just a charitable Christian prince. He was also instinctively hostile to anything that smacked of the heterodox, in particular Jansenism, which, under strong Jesuit influence, he equated with rebellion. By the early 1680s the king's increasingly devout attitude to personal morality and worship, encouraged by his second wife, Françoise d'Aubigné, marquise de Maintenon (1635–1719), whom he married in 1683, had become allied to his fear of religious disorder as manifested by Jansenism and the Huguenots. This combination of attitudes flowed together with a desire to live up to his title of "Eldest Son of the Church" at a time when Emperor Leopold I was pushing the Turks back in the Balkans and when relations between France and the papacy were in tatters over the régale dispute (when Louis extended the royal right to gather the revenues of vacant episcopal sees to areas of the kingdom that had previously been immune). Despite attempts by Colbert and Louvois to restrain persecution of Protestants by some intendants, Louis became increasingly convinced that forced conversions were effectual, an approach that culminated in the Edict of Fontainebleau in September 1685, which revoked all rights for Huguenots. Even when it became clear to ministers and generals by 1689 that this revocation had created a potentially dangerous fifth column inside France (which erupted in the vicious revolt of the Camisards in 1702–1705), the king's religious conscience would not allow him to restore Huguenot rights. Thus far, Louis XIV's religious policies were coherently Catholic and Gallican, zealous in defense of the temporal independence of the French church from Rome. But the repair of relations with the papacy in the 1690s, plus the resurfacing of the Jansenist controversy after 1703, pushed him into accepting ultramontane, pro-papal positions held by the Sorbonne. Eventually he solicited and accepted the 1713 papal bull Unigenitus, which condemned Jansenism but simultaneously mounted a full-scale attack on Gallican liberties, a move that did immense long-term damage to the Bourbon monarchy's image as the defender of France and French interests.

If order could be consciously pursued through state policies, Louis XIV was nevertheless also the beneficiary of changing attitudes to social and political life in the mid-seventeenth century, and in particular a growing distaste for personal violence. The need to display honnête behavior was not merely restricted to domestic social situations, but applied equally to public social behavior. The need for restraint, politeness, and self-discipline in deportment as well as language was emerging as the cornerstone of an ethical order to which one simply had to subscribe if one wished to remain a sociable being. What is more, the disorderly and chaotic Fronde, erupting just as such ideals were entering French cultural life, had the effect of reinforcing enthusiasm for obedience and decorum in both the social and the political fields. Louis XIV personally encouraged stronger discipline and self-control at court, in his armies and fleets, and in the church, so that such nostrums percolated through noble society and contributed to growing domestic stability in this period.

CONCLUSION

Throughout his reign, Louis XIV had placed the Bourbon dynasty, the Catholic faith, and the royal court at the center of his existence, and he had been highly mindful of the interests and outlooks of his propertied subjects. Nevertheless, compromise and cooperation had its limits, and it would be a misleading oversimplification to see this as a monarchy engaged in the revivification of feudalism in conjunction with a landed noble "class." In the first instance, the French nobility was in no sense a coherent class, andsociety as a whole was pervaded bymyriadcorporate andfamilial loyalties andinterests. Moreover, for all the king's skill in trying to harmonize his own interests with those of his propertied subjects, Louis's reign was marked with a highly authoritarian stamp that pressed the imposition of firmer discipline in the armed forces, the curtailment of judicial independence and privileges, and a demand for religious conformity and subordination that aroused hostility across Europe. On his death, on 1 September 1715, Louis XIV left a kingdom in an unprecedented state of domestic tranquillity that was to last throughout the regency for his five-year-old great-grandson, Louis XV; this can in large part be attributed to firm royal control of the military, more sophisticated poor relief strategies, and a general ethos of political obedience. But the destabilization of the credit markets wrought by the previous thirty years of unprecedented military mobilization, the unresolved issue of tax privileges, the example of baroque kingship that Louis XIV brought to its apogee as a model for rule, and the legacy of Jansenism were to bedevil his successors' governments for the rest of the eighteenth century.

See also Bourbon Dynasty (France); Camisard Revolt; Colbert, Jean-Baptiste; France; Fronde; Gallicanism; Habsburg Dynasty; Jansenism; League of Augsburg, War of the; Louvois, François-Michel Le Tellier, marquis de; Mazarin, Jules; Poisons, Affair of the; Spanish Succession, War of the; Versailles.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Black, Jeremy. From Louis XIV to Napoleon: The Fate of a Great Power. London, 1999. Chapter 2 gives a clear and accurate survey of French foreign policy in this period.

Bluche, François. Louis XIV. Oxford, 1990. Translated by Mark Greengrass. A highly conservative biographical interpretation by a French scholar.

Sturdy, David J. Louis XIV. New York, 1998. A clear, thematic survey of the reign and of the problems faced by the king.

Wolf, John B. Louis XIV. New York, 1968. The best biography in any language.

GUY ROWLANDS