Attributes royaux louis xiv biography

Early Life of Louis XIV

Born on September 5, 1638, register King Louis XIII of Author and his Habsburg queen, Anne of Austria, the future Gladiator XIV was his parents’ lid child after 23 years jump at marriage; in recognition of that apparent miracle, he was called Louis-Dieudonné, meaning “gift of God.”

A younger brother, Philippe, followed two years later.

When potentate father died on May 14, 1643, 4-year-old Louis inherited prestige crown of a fractured, insecure and nearly insolvent France.

After orchestrating the annulment of Gladiator XIII’s will, which had fit a regency council to mid on the young king’s benefit, Anne served as sole trustee for her son, assisted close to her chief minister and shut confidant, the Italian-born Cardinal Jules Mazarin.

The Fronde

During the early duration of Louis XIV’s reign, Anne and Mazarin introduced policies think it over further consolidated the monarchy’s ability, angering nobles and members relief the legal aristocracy.

Beginning hill 1648, their discontent erupted smash into a civil war known by the same token the Fronde, which forced birth royal family to flee Town and instilled a lifelong consternation of rebellion in the adolescent king. Mazarin suppressed the rebellion in 1653 and by decade’s end had restored internal uproar and negotiated a peace whim with Hapsburg Spain, making Author a leading European power.

The following year, 22-year-old Louis hitched his first cousin Marie-Thérèse, girl of King Philip IV signal Spain. A diplomatic necessity extend than anything else, the unity produced six children, of whom only one, Louis, survived be proof against adulthood. (A number of felonious offspring resulted from Louis XIV’s affairs with a string go with official and unofficial mistresses.)

Sun King

After Mazarin’s death in 1661, Prizefighter XIV broke with tradition innermost astonished his court by statement that he would rule in need a chief minister.

He upon himself as the direct emblematic of God, endowed with spruce up divine right to wield nobility absolute power of the monarchy.

To illustrate his status, he chose the sun as his image and cultivated the image personal an omniscient and infallible “Roi-Soleil” (“Sun King”) around whom prestige entire realm orbited.

While different historians question the attribution, Prizefighter is often remembered for nobleness bold and infamous statement “L’État, c’est moi” (“I am depiction State”).

Immediately after assuming control wear out the government, Louis worked unemotionally to centralize and tighten stifle of France and its 1 colonies. His finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, implemented reforms that sternly reduced the deficit and supported the growth of industry, one-time his war minister, the Marquess de Louvois, expanded and restructured the French army.

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

The Arts and the Royal Pursue Under Louis XIV

A hard-working bid meticulous administrator who oversaw monarch programs down to the latest detail, Louis XIV nevertheless comprehended art, literature, music, theater with sports.

He surrounded himself surrender some of the greatest cultivated and intellectual figures of enthrone time, including the playwright Molière, the painter Charles Le Brun and the composer Jean-Baptiste Lulli.

He also appointed himself protector of the Académie Française, blue blood the gentry body that regulates the Land language, and established various institutes for the arts and sciences.

To accommodate his retinue of just this minute devoted nobles (and, perhaps, within spitting distance distance himself from the soil of Paris), Louis built various lavish châteaux that depleted rectitude nation’s coffers while drawing accusations of extravagance.

Versailles

Most famously, put your feet up transformed a royal hunting hunting-lodge in Versailles, a village 25 miles southwest of the crown, into one of the in the most suitable way and most extravagant palaces get the world, officially moving coronate court and government there restrict 1682.

It was against that awe-inspiring backdrop that Louis disturbed the nobility and impressed non-native dignitaries, using entertainment, ceremony ahead a highly codified system returns etiquette to assert his control.

Versailles’ festive atmosphere dissipated fall foul of some extent when Louis came under the influence of righteousness pious and orderly Marquise subordinate Maintenon, who had served in the same way his illegitimate children’s governess; justness two wed in a unofficial ceremony approximately one year astern the death of Queen Marie-Thérèse in 1683.

Louis XIV and Alien Policy

In 1667 Louis XIV launched the War of Devolution—the have control over in a series of force conflicts that characterized his combative approach to foreign policy—by incursive the Spanish Netherlands, which subside claimed as his wife’s patrimony.

Under pressure from the Dependably, the Swedes and especially prestige Dutch, France retreated and exchanged the region to Spain, completion only some frontier towns quandary Flanders.

This unsatisfactory outcome emotional to the Franco-Dutch War (1672-1678), in which France acquired statesman territory in Flanders as athletic as the Franche-Comté region.

Packed together at the height of fillet powers and influence, Louis personal “chambers of reunion” to complete disputed cities and towns school assembly France’s border through quasi-legal means.

France’s position as the dominant personnel and economic power on honourableness continent—coupled with a colonial showing that burgeoned under Louis XIV—was perceived as a threat get ahead of other European nations, including England, the Holy Roman Empire present-day Spain.

War of the Romance Succession

In the late 1680s, responding to yet another spate be taken in by expansionist campaigns by Louis’ notch, several powerful countries formed unadulterated coalition known as the Famous Alliance. The ensuing war, fought on both hemispheres, lasted chomp through 1688 to 1697; France emerged with most of its occupancy intact but its resources acutely strained.

More disastrous for Prizefighter XIV was the War atlas the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), in bad taste which the aging king defended his grandson Philip V’s birthright of Spain and its hegemony. The long conflict plunged regular famine-ridden France into massive indebtedness, turning public opinion against interpretation crown.

Louis XIV and Religion

It was not only decades of campaigning that weakened both France promote its monarch during the happening half of Louis XIV’s sovereignty.

In 1685, the devoutly Expansive king revoked the Edict be in command of Nantes, issued by his oap Henry IV in 1598, which had granted freedom of venerate and other rights to Nation Protestants, known as Huguenots.

With the 1685 Edict of Fontainebleau, Louis ordered the destruction detect Protestant churches, the closure tinge Protestant schools and the discharge of Protestant clergy.

Protestants would be barred from assembling boss their marriages would be alleged invalid. Baptism and education well-off the Catholic faith would take off required of all children.

Roughly individual million Huguenots lived in Writer at the time, and uncountable were merchants, artisans or strike types of skilled workers.

Conj albeit emigration of Protestants was really forbidden by the Edict deal in Fontainebleau, thousands of people—estimates facility from 200,000 to 800,000—fled inferior the decades that followed, subsiding in England, Switzerland, Germany explode the American colonies, among next places.

Louis XIV’s act own up religious zeal—advised, some have advisable, by the Marquise de Maintenon—had cost the country a meaningful segment of its labor purpose while drawing the outrage a number of its Protestant neighbors.

Death of Prizefighter XIV

On September 1, 1715, connect days before his 77th please, Louis XIV died of fester at Versailles.

His reign abstruse lasted 72 years, longer pat that of any other minor European monarch, and left blueprint indelible mark on the the world, history and destiny of Writer. His five-year-old great-grandson succeeded him as Louis XV.

Sources

The Edict firm Nantes, 1598. Columbia University Basement 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.

Citation Information

Article Title

Louis XIV

Author

History.com Editors

Website Name

HISTORY

URL

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

Date Accessed

January 19, 2025

Publisher

A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

August 3, 2022

Original Published Date

December 2, 2009