The Sun King

Louis XIV was born on 5 September 1638 and became King on May 14 1643 at the age of four years and eight months on the death of his father Louis XIII. He attended the Conseil d'en haut from 1649 when he was eleven years old. He announced his coming of age, in accordance with a fundamental law of the kingdom, in September 1651 when he entered upon his fourteenth year. But he did not begin to rule personally until he was twenty-two, on 10 March 1661.

This was the day after the death of his first minister, Cardinal Mazarin, an Italian, who had secretly married the Queen-Mother, Anne of Austria, a Habsburg of the Spanish branch. Louis held the reins of government until the day of his death, I September 1715, when he was almost seventy-seven. In the course of his reign of 72 years France took part in seven wars which either started as or developed into struggles between European powers for world supremacy. France was involved in the continuation of the long religious conflict in which Christendom was torn apart into several rival churches. She participated also in the rapid growth of oceanic trade and in European contacts with America, Africa and Asia.

France played a part in the change from the era of the Renaissance and the Reformation to the era of the Enlightenment, and in the transition from Aristotelianism to Cartesianism, to Newtonianism and to a mechanistic explanation of the cosmos - an intellectual revolution without precedent in the history of mankind. It would perhaps be meaningless to try to summarize this long reign, extending over such a period, in a few pages. It seems better to attempt to answer certain questions which always arouse controversy, and we have chosen the following. Was Louis XIV, in his own words, ‘too fond of war'? Was he a ‘tyrant'? Was he ‘the great revolutionary of French history'? Was he ‘a great man'?