‘The Love of Glory’
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‘The love of glory has all the same subtle shades and, may I say, all the same questionings as the tender passions’
So much has been written about Louis XIV that it is impossible to think of him without prejudice. Many have admired him extravagantly, and as many have detested him no less fervently. It is not easy to distinguish the man from the King. He lived so completely in public that he almost ceased to exist as a private individual.
Louis ascended the throne in 1643, at the age of four and a half. He was already conscious of his superiority to other mortals; when Cinq Mars had presumptuously picked him up in his nursery, Louis had kicked and screamed till he was set down again. Even as a child he possessed a marked sense of theatre and must have relished his presentation to the Parlement in their red robes and bonnets. Their President, M Omar Talon, went on his knees before the boy to tell him that, to the lawyers, his chair of state represented ‘the throne of the Living God’, and that ‘the realm’s estates pay you honour and duty as they would to a God who can be seen’.
Anne of Austria swiftly persuaded the Parlement to set aside the late King’s will, which had left her only the title of Regent while giving the substance of power to a council of advisers. Like Marie de Medici, she meant to be all-powerful, and like Marie de Medici, real power lay with an Italian favourite. But there was little resemblance between the Concini and Giulio Mazzarini, better known as Cardinal Mazarin. This low-born adventurer, who was reputed to be the grandson of a Sicilian fisherman, had combined the careers of soldier, diplomat and cleric, first in the Papal service and then in the French, winning the approval of Louis XIII and Richelieu who obtained the Red Hat for him (though he only took minor orders and was never a priest). Where Richelieu had been nervous and harsh, Mazarin was suave and charming. His character was subtler, more accommodating. Never discouraged or depressed, his motto was ‘Time is on my side’. Tall, fair-haired and handsome—Richelieu said he looked like Buckingham—he knew how to please women. Anne of Austria was completely captivated: as Voltaire put it, ‘He had such dominion over her as a clever man may well have over a woman born with sufficient weakness to be ruled and sufficient obstinacy to persist in her choice.’ Even so, the court was taken by surprise when the Regent confirmed him in his post of First Minister.
No one expected Mazarin to continue in office for very long. The opposition which had plagued Richelieu descended on the court; they had suffered either on behalf of, or with, the Queen and they expected to be rewarded. This Cabale des Importants included the Duc de Vendôme, Henri IV’s son, and Vendôme’s own son, the gallant Duc de Beaufort; the Bishop of Beauvais (whom a fellow prelate described as a ‘mitred beast’); Marie de Hautefort, and, of course, Mme de Chevreuse. The latter shrilly insisted that Anne must return everything which Louis XIII had stolen from the great lords. After four months the Regent grew tired of her former friends, the last straw being a plot to murder Mazarin, and banished them.
Anne was a strong, vigorous woman, still goodlooking if somewhat full-blown. She ate enormously at all meals, and when angry screamed at those who displeased her. She was unconventional; during the torrid summer of 1646 she and her ladies, accompanied by little Louis, disported themselves in the Seine, clad in grey nightdresses. While the Regent may well have been in love with her First Minister, it is certain that she never lived with him; Anne was a devout Spanish Catholic and it would have been impossible for her to sleep with the Cardinal without her ladies knowing of such a spectacular liaison, as they themselves slept at the foot of her bed every night. None the less, she trusted Mazarin almost as a second husband.
In the long run it was fortunate for France that she did. Mazarin continued all Richelieu’s policies and abroad the benefits were quickly evident. The Thirty Years War came to an end in 1648 when Sweden, France and the Empire made a peace by which France gained Alsace (even if it was still nominally subject to the Emperor). The negotiations were conducted in French, the beginning of its long sway as the language of diplomacy. France remained at war with Spain, but the latter was now too weak to be of much danger.
Louis was an attractive little boy, bright, high-spirited and unusually goodlooking, though he lost some of his looks after catching smallpox in 1647. His education was designed to give him an ineradicable sense of the dignity of kingship; he had to copy out texts such as ‘Homage is owed to Kings; they do what they wish’. He was told to model himself on Saint Louis and on his grandfather. Henri IV was now referred to as ‘Henri le Grand’ in official documents, while one of Louis’s tutors, Bishop Péréfixe, compiled a eulogistic life for the young monarch’s edification. Anne is said to have told the boy not to copy his father because ‘People wept at the death of Henri IV, but laughed at that of Louis XIII’. However, Louis always remembered his father with affection.
Each night the Queen’s valet read him extracts from Eudes de Mezeray’s History of France, though Louis himself much preferred fairy-tales. He was taught riding, fencing and deportment, how to carry himself as a King; he also learnt the lute and the guitar, and how to sing and dance. He could speak good Italian and passable Spanish. Apart from basic arithmetic, he was given little instruction in mathematics and remained more or less ignorant of geography, economics and modern history.
His tutors were so obsequious that he christened one—Marshal de Villeroy—‘Maréchal Oui-Sire’, but it cannot be said that Louis was spoilt. Although fond of him, his mother regretted not having a daughter and preferred his delicate brother, Philippe, whom she called her little girl. If the King had his own household from the age of seven, his stockings were often in holes, while he never had enough sheets (for the rest of his life he slept with the bed clothes wrapped round his waist, and nothing over his chest and shoulders save a nightshirt). He was so much left to his own devices that once when he fell into the big fountain in the Palais Royal garden, he was not rescued until evening. On state occasions, however, he was paraded in a coat of cloth of gold and a plumed cavalier hat with a diamond buckle. He had toy soldiers of silver and toy cannon of gold, but his favourite possession was a miniature arquebus made by his father. Years later the King told Mme de Maintenon how he and his brother had roamed happily through the Louvre, teasing the maids and stealing omelettes from the kitchens. They used to play with a servant’s little girl—she pretended to be Queen and they acted as her footmen. But in 1648 life assumed an air so menacing that even children could not fail to notice it.
The Fronde was an expression of general discontent. Years of frustration and irritation had at last reached boiling point. But it was not an attempt at revolution in the contemporary English manner. There was an odd note of frivolity in its name, which meant catapulting—or even pea-shooting. A popular song ran:
Un vent de Fronde
S’est levé ce matin
Je crois qu’il gronde
Contre le Mazarin.
The attitude of the Frondeurs may have been negative and unconstructive, but they included the majority of articulate Frenchmen. There were to be two Frondes—the Fronde of the Parlement, and the Fronde of the Princes.
In five years, Mazarin had made himself even more hated than Richelieu. His financial methods—such as manipulating the Rentes (or government annuities) by withholding interest and then buying them cheap when the price fell—caused widespread bankruptcies among the bourgeois. Taxes were collected with such savagery that in 1646 over 20,000 Frenchmen were in prison for fiscal offences. At the same time the Cardinal displayed both avarice and ostentatious luxury—he was famous for his Titians and Correggios, his collection of gems and his exquisite library, notorious for hoarding bullion. Surrounded by a bevy of black-eyed nieces, always fondling some scented marmoset or lap-dog, speaking with a strong Italian accent, and embarrassingly obsequious, Mazarin aroused instinctive dislike in the Frenchmen of his time.
The office-holding noblesse de la robe was both alarmed and angered by the increasing power of the Intendants throughout the realm, which detracted from their prestige and diminished their influence. The Paris Parlement was finally infuriated beyond endurance by an edict of 1646 which made them pay duty on fruit and vegetables sent up from their country houses. They began to refuse any edicts which increased taxation, winning considerable popularity. In May 1648 they announced their intention of serving the public and rooting out abuses of state. They even developed a presumptuous theory that the will of the King was not law—events across the Channel had not gone unnoticed. Mazarin smelt danger and in July agreed to reforms suggested by the Parlement. Then news came of another triumphant victory by Condé (Enghien, who had now succeeded his father) at Lens, and the Cardinal felt strong enough to arrest the three noisiest lawyers. An attempt to rescue one of them, the demagogue Broussel, turned into a riot and then into a revolt; 200 barricades blocked the narrow streets. A deputation went to the Queen to demand Broussel’s release, and when it returned empty-handed it was nearly murdered by an armed mob. Despite the Queen’s tearful opposition—she threatened to strangle Broussel with her own hands—Mazarin released the lawyers. Shortly after, the Regent signed a Declaration of Reform.
In January 1649 Condé and a royalist army surrounded Paris, whereupon Anne and the King fled to Saint-Germain. The siege continued for three months. During this time Louis and his mother slept on truckle beds at a Saint-Germain denuded of furniture. Ladies had to make do with straw palliasses, while gentlemen lay on the floor. There were ballets and banquets, but the royal coffers were soon empty—Louis dismissed his pages because he could not feed them. The royal party can hardly have been cheered by the news from England; Charles I had been beheaded. Anne groaned, ‘This is a blow to make Kings tremble!’ However, the first Fronde came to an end when the Regent grudgingly confirmed her Declaration. The court returned to Paris in August 1649.
Mazarin and the Regent were now threatened by ‘Le Grand Condé’. The young warlord was an insufferably haughty little man with an overbred face like a bird of prey, who could never forget that he was First Prince of the Blood and possessed six dukedoms. He thought himself all-powerful, insulting both Anne and the Cardinal—on one occasion he pulled the latter’s beard. To his own astonishment Condé was arrested and imprisoned at Vincennes in January 1650. His friends soon raised the standard of revolt, beginning the Fronde of the Princes. All over France nobles rose, but at first the royal troops were successful (during one of these engagements, Louis was shot at). Meanwhile, behind Mazarin’s back, a debauched little abbé, Paul de Gondi (the future Cardinal de Retz), who was the co-adjutor to the Archbishop of Paris, was plotting to unite the two Frondes; he was able to do so because his office gave him a seat in the Parlement, where he ostentatiously wore a dagger known as the breviary of M de Retz. He intrigued to such effect that the lawyers allied with the Princes, and Parlement asked the Regent to release Condé and dismiss Mazarin.
Mazarin fled to Cologne, disguised as a musketeer, with Anne’s diamonds in his pocket. Gaston d’Orléans was proclaimed Lieutenant-General of France. Suspecting that the Queen was about to flee from Paris to join Mazarin, a Frondeur mob broke into the Louvre and demanded to see the King. Anne, who was on the point of leaving, hastily changed into a nightdress, while Louis leapt into bed—still wearing his boots—and pretended to be asleep. In single file the rabble of Paris shuffled past his bed, some daring to peer behind the curtains to see if he really were inside. Condé was released from Vincennes.
Gaston d’Orléans said that during these years the political scene changed so often and so swiftly that he was in a state of almost perpetual bewilderment. In September 1651 Louis was crowned at Rheims (during the celebrations he danced in a court ballet, wearing the costume of a ‘Sun King’). The ‘Eighth Sacrament’ confirmed him in his extraordinary and precocious self-confidence. Furthermore, he had achieved his legal majority and Mazarin, feeling secure again, returned. It was too soon. Condé, during his absence, had quarrelled with the Parlement and had left Paris, but he now advanced on the capital with an army—he may even have hoped to seize the throne. In the battles which followed Condé very nearly captured Louis. Anne was only persuaded to stay in Paris by her confidence in that great soldier, Turennes, the son of Henri IV’s old enemy, who had rallied to the Royalist party—she told him gratefully, ‘Without you every town in France would have shut its gates on the King.’ But Condé continued to advance. In July 1652 he fought a battle in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, during which La Grande Mademoiselle (Gaston’s daughter) trained the guns of the Bastille on Turennes’s troops and opened the gates to Condé. The royal forces withdrew, leaving Condé in occupation of the capital, and a massacre of Mazarin’s supporters ensued; law and order broke down, to such an extent that the Parisians began to starve. Shrewdly Mazarin left France for a second time. Finally Condé lost his nerve and retreated to Flanders.
The Fronde collapsed. Peasants and bourgeois alike were desperate for peace; mercenary armies were devastating France and famine was widespread—there were cases of cannibalism. Both the nobles and the lawyers were disillusioned; their challenge to Absolutism had failed utterly. In October 1652 Louis XIV entered Paris to the cheers of its fickle inhabitants. The exiled Charles II of England rode beside him. In December the fourteen-year-old monarch showed both courage and dissimulation in effecting the arrest of Cardinal de Retz (Gondi). The latter was still dangerous in his residence at Nôtre-Dame, guarded by a mob who idolized him. When he visited the young King at the Louvre, he was greeted effusively by Louis, who spoke enthusiastically of a play which he had just seen, his last words as he left the room being, ‘and above all when no one is on the stage’. The words were the signal for his Guards to arrest de Retz, who speedily found himself in Vincennes. Condé, who had fled to Spain, was condemned to death. The Parlement was humiliated by an edict that it must henceforward register all decrees of the royal council. In February 1653 Mazarin returned—he had triumphed, though his hair had turned white. The Fronde was over.
Mazarin was now undisputed master of France. He took pains to train the young King in statecraft; in 1654 he started to hold special sessions of the Council at which business was simplified so that the boy could follow; soon Louis was attending daily. Of this time he wrote in his memoirs how he never ceased to test himself in secret—‘I was delighted and encouraged when I sometimes learnt that my youthful ideas had been adopted by able experienced men.’ His already phenomenal self-confidence was growing. One day in March 1655, while hunting, he learnt that the Parlement had met without authorization to reconsider recent edicts; booted and spurred, Louis strode into the Parlement and told the Président, ‘I forbid you to allow these meetings and any one of you to ask for them.’ He began to impress ambassadors with his knowledge of foreign policy. By 1657 he was visiting Mazarin every morning to discuss matters of state.
The one matter in which the Cardinal did not indulge the King was finance, which he never discussed. While he himself was amassing a vast fortune, Mazarin kept Louis short of ready cash. Voltaire says that he administered the royal finances like the steward of some bankrupt nobleman—the King often had to borrow money. Yet when Mazarin shrewdly presented Louis with all his own enormous wealth, in a specially drawn-up deed, Louis promptly returned it. Until the end he deferred to the Cardinal.
Mazarin’s foreign policy was imaginative. Spain, for whom Condé was now fighting, had recaptured all the French gains, so the Cardinal made an alliance with Cromwell, after which the Spaniards were defeated on both sea and land. In 1658 Turennes won a great victory, the Battle of the Dunes, capturing Dunkirk, the key to Flanders. Louis made a grand entrance into the port, though by the terms of the treaty it soon had to be surrendered to the English. When the Protector died, the French court went into mourning. It was in 1658, too, that Spain made peace, France retaining Artois, Cerdagne and Roussillon and remaining in occupation of the Duchy of Lorraine; Condé received a full pardon. The peace was sealed by Louis’s betrothal to a Spanish princess.
The King was no stranger to the pleasures of the bed. He was said to have been initiated, on his mother’s instructions, by Mme de Beauvais, who was the chief lady-in-waiting and known as ‘One-eyed Cateau’; she lay in wait for him as he returned from his bath. From her he went on to various chambermaids and laundresses, contracting gonorrhea to his shame and self-disgust.
In 1657 he had fallen head over heels in love with Mazarin’s niece, Marie Mancini, who was only seventeen. Mme de Motteville describes her as sallow and scraggy, but in fact she was pretty enough, and interesting too—an intense blue-stocking with huge brown eyes. She refused to become his mistress, the affair being highly intellectual; they exchanged verses and read favourite books to each other. Louis gave her his little dog, Friponne, and bought her Henrietta Maria’s pearls (poverty had forced the English Queen to sell them). By 1658 the King wanted to marry Marie and was encouraged by the exiled Queen Christina of Sweden. Mazarin was horrified when Louis asked him for his niece in marriage; he told the King that he would stab Marie rather than allow her to disgrace the throne. The lovers parted tearfully in the courtyard of the Louvre, Marie crying, ‘You are King and you are weeping and yet I have to leave!’ A long, sad farewell lasted until the autumn of 1659 when Marie begged Louis to stop writing to her. (She became the wife of the Roman Prince Colonna, in whose father’s household Mazarin’s father had been a servant; it turned out an unhappy marriage.)
In June 1660 like his father before him, Louis married an Infanta of Spain. At the nuptial blessing in the church at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, near the Spanish border, Maria Theresa wore a dress of silver brocade with a forty-foot train of blue velvet; she was small and stout, almost a dwarf, with a long, fat face partly redeemed by wonderfully curly hair of brilliant gold, and bright blue eyes. Her husband, whom she was meeting for the first time—they had been married by proxy—was in gold brocade; she was alarmed by his insistence on consummating their marriage the same night. The following year Maria Theresa presented him with a Dauphin (Louis—known to history as le Grand Dauphin, to his contemporaries as Monseigneur), but the six other children who followed all died in infancy. Amiable, good-natured, but unintelligent, always chattering in bad French, she bored Louis. The poor young woman solaced herself with prayer and by indulging her passion for rich food, especially chocolate, and garlic sauces.
At twenty-two Louis XIV was a handsome, well-built little man of five feet four inches, dark-skinned, with long brown hair. His face was round, with a firm yet sensual mouth, and was dominated by a great Bourbon nose; at this time he wore a pencil-thin moustache. His eyes are sometimes described as grey, sometimes as hazel, being of that changeable hue which the French call chatoyant. Despite his small size—he wore six-inch heels to offset it—he had broad shoulders and was unusually muscular. He possessed an unmistakably regal presence and what contemporaries describe as an almost god-like way of carrying himself. He was already a man of overwhelmingly strong personality, with a rather grave charm, which was enhanced by beautiful manners; he seldom joked for fear of hurting people’s feelings.
Louis was highly intelligent, with a marked sense of justice and fair play. (Lord Acton considered him ‘by far the ablest man who was born in modern times on the steps of a throne’.) Although sensitive and emotional, he displayed almost complete self-control from a very early age—he never showed signs of pain, never gave way to weariness before his courtiers; in some ways he resembled an actor perpetually on stage. Like his grandfather he had voracious appetites, being a gargantuan eater and an insatiable womanizer, and like all Bourbons he loved hunting. A need for constant exercise was evident in long walks, in tennis and pall-mall, and in his enjoyment of dancing in court ballets.
So far the reign of Louis XIV had been very like that of Louis XIII. There had been a long minority under a tactless Queen Regent, who governed through an Italian favourite. The turbulence of the great nobles and the lawyers had plunged France into civil wars of just the same sort as those of the early years of the preceding reign. Finally, order had been established by a strong and ruthless First Minister.
From 1660, however, the Cardinal was ailing—he had cancer. Early on the morning of 9 March 1661 Pierrette, Louis’s old nurse who still slept in his bedchamber, woke the King to tell him that Mazarin was dead. Louis rose, dressed, and locked himself in the Cardinal’s room, weeping. When he emerged he ordered the court to go into mourning as if for a member of the royal family—he had been fond of the old man, almost as a second father (in his memoirs he wrote that he had loved him).
Next day Louis summoned the Council to meet at the Louvre, at seven o’clock in the morning. Each of its members hoped to be the new First Minister and all were astonished when the King told them, ‘It is time for me to govern. You will help me with advice when I ask for it … Secretaries of State, I order you to sign nothing without my command, not even a passport or a safe conduct.’ From his memoirs it is evident that Louis was amused by the Council’s astonishment—he saw that they expected him to grow bored. He wrote, ‘A man reigns by work and it is ungrateful and presumptuous to God, unjust and tyrannical to men, to wish to reign without working.’ He himself often worked a full eight-hour day, reading every document which bore his name.
Even at this early age he had evolved the principles which governed his reign. Mazarin had assured him that he could be the greatest King the world had ever known. He wrote proudly, ‘A ruling and over-riding passion for greatness and glory obliterates all others’; and that for a King ‘the love of glory has all the same subtle shades and, may I say, all the same questionings as the tender passions.’ Louis considered himself not only master of his subjects but also owner of their goods; this belief was not his own invention, but was derived from the place of the Emperor in Roman Law. Nor was it a concept without dignity, for Louis also believed that it was his duty to consider the welfare of his subjects rather than his own. ‘If God gives me grace to do all I hope to, I will bring happiness during my reign, to such an extent that … nobody, however poor he may be, shall be uncertain of his daily bread, either from his own labour or from public assistance by the state.’
Louis XIV set out to be a great King at a moment when France had decided that she wanted to be a great nation. He threatened Spain, and even the Papacy, with war merely because of trivial insults to his ambassadors. The French applauded, and welcomed his early campaigns. Their attitude was a little like that of the Germans in 1933—they wanted a ruler who would give them self-respect. After the remote Louis XIII, the country was delighted to find itself with a charming and accessible young King. Their adulation affected even les Grands, in the same way that Hitler’s popularity cowed the German ruling classes. The upper ranks of the French nobility had been badly shaken by the débâcle of the Fronde. If Richelieu could bring them to heel, an able King who governed for himself, and was a popular idol, could easily exploit their lack of self-confidence.
Louis had the hypnotic charisma later possessed by Napoleon and by Hitler. Saint-Simon writes of his ‘terrifying majesty’. His all-seeing glance could make the haughtiest duke tremble—he could make even Condé shake with fear. Fascist writers of the 1920s and 1930s saw him as a precursor of the Dictators—a ruler who embodied the National Will, the Warrior King of Action Française. But, unlike Hitler and Mussolini, and indeed unlike Napoleon, Louis put his office before himself; he was the anointed King of France rather than Louis XIV. Voltaire has a revealing story, that when a sycophant proposed that the Académie should debate which was the King’s greatest virtue, Louis actually blushed.
The Dauphin was born in June 1662. The King held a fête in celebration, in an enclosure between the Louvre and the Tuileries (which is still known as the Place de Carrousel—or ‘Tournament Place’). Three Queens were watching from a dais—Anne of Austria, Maria Theresa and Henrietta Maria of England. The court celebrated just as the Valois would have done, with jousts and a trot-past to music of five companies of horsemen in fantastic costumes—Romans, Persians, Turks, Indians and Americans. Louis was at their head in the role of King of the Romans, clad in flame-colour.
It was about this time that he adopted the sun in splendour as his emblem (Louis XIII had chosen the device of a sun appearing from behind a cloud to symbolize his son’s birth). Many other French Kings had used emblems—Louis XII the porcupine, François I the salamander—but none to such effect. For Louis XIV, the sun in splendour was a personal declaration of policy; he wrote in his memoirs, ‘I chose the sun because of the unique quality of its radiance … the good it does everywhere, endlessly creating joy and activity on all sides … Certainly the brightest, most beautiful image of a great King.’
His determination to be master was quickly shown. The Surintendant des Finances, Nicolas Fouquet, had plundered the royal treasury, exaggerating statements of government expenditure, and was parading his insolent and ostentatious luxury. He had prepared a refuge against disgrace by fortifying the island of Belle-Ile with cannon and armed retainers. He possessed a stranglehold over the treasury and the King feared him as a dangerous obstacle to financial reform. In August 1661 the unsuspecting Fouquet invited Louis to his magnificent château at Vaux-le-Vicomte (which was reputed to have cost eighteen million livres, about £ 750,000 in English money of the period); where he was giving a splendid housewarming party with a firework display and a play by Molière. Amid the bursting rockets, Louis grew angrier and angrier; he was particularly incensed by Fouquet’s arms, a climbing squirrel, and his motto, ‘What heights shall I not reach’, which were depicted everywhere. On the way home the King said to his mother, ‘Madame, he is going to disgorge our money!’ Within three weeks, Fouquet was in the Bastille (having been arrested by M d’Artagnan) and Louis made sure that he stayed in prison until his death nearly twenty years later.
Louis XIV and his heirs, attributed to Largillière
Louis XIV, wax bust by Benoist
To take Fouquet’s place, the King appointed Colbert Controller-General. Mazarin had once said to Louis, ‘I owe you everything, but I think I’ve repaid some of the debt by giving you Colbert.’ Jean Baptiste Colbert was the son of a draper of Rheims, who had studied the law and then spent some time in banking before entering Mazarin’s service. His worth was speedily recognized by the King, who preferred ministers of humble origin (no Prince of the Blood held ministerial office under Louis XIV, and only one Duke). Colbert did the work of many ministers—of finance, public works, trade and industry, agriculture, the colonies, the navy and even the arts. Although bemused by mercantilist economics—he believed that the more gold and silver a country possessed the more powerful it would be—this frowning, beetle-browed ‘man of marble’ was the most businesslike of all the ministers of the Ancien Régime. In 1661 the treasury received thirty-one million livres in revenue, while the tax farmers took more than double that amount. Colbert retrieved a good deal of it, introducing some measure of honesty into the public accounts. He then reduced direct taxation—the taille—by nearly a half; he did so by raising indirect taxation, with a luxury tax on coffee, tobacco and certain wines. However, he reduced the salt duty because salt was essential, and he exempted large families from the taille. A sense of social justice was also evident in the revocation of patents of nobility granted in the last thirty years; thousands of rich men were forced to bear a fair share of taxation. By 1667 he had more than doubled the royal revenues.
Tirelessly the Controller-General encouraged the establishment of new industries and the expansion of existing ones. He bought technical secrets from abroad, imported skilled labour, and employed inspectors to enforce uniform standards of quality. State factories were set up. Steel, tin-plate, glass, pottery, mirrors, furniture, clocks, velvet, silk, lace and linen, all began to be manufactured in France on a large scale. It was now that the Gobelin tapestry looms came to Paris, that the carpets of Savonnerie became famous. Colbert was determined that nothing should be imported. He raised external customs duties, forbidding the export of corn to ensure a cheap supply. To aid the home market, he tried to abolish internal customs duties and began a nation-wide programme of canal-digging and road-building.
Colbert admired the Dutch for making their little country a European power solely through trade. He therefore set up five great trading companies, sent new colonists to Canada, now known officially as New France, established trading posts at Pondicherry and other ports in India and even Madagascar, and bought a dozen islands in the Caribbean. A navy was needed, not only for war, but to protect French merchantmen. As Minister of Marine, he increased the French navy from twenty ships to over 250, based on depots at Brest and Toulon, and manned by over 60,000 sailors; and founded a school for naval officers.
For all his good intentions, Colbert lacked human feeling. It was brutally evident in his otherwise admirable plans for New France. Sending out a cargo of ‘150 girls together with stallions, mares and ewes’, he ordered the garrison to marry the girls on their arrival, and get them with child by the end of the year.
Modern research has shown that ‘Colbertism’ had many shortcomings. Though he attempted to moderate the ferocious exactions of the tax farmers, they were never properly restrained during bad harvests; it was this, not Louis’s wars, which reduced French peasants to the misery later depicted by Bruyère. Nor was there any machinery to regulate the grain, trade and wheat prices, despite Colbert’s belief in controls; so that both peasants and urban poor suffered unnecessarily. Colbert also failed to attract sufficient capital to his new trading companies. Undoubtedly his administration benefited the economy, and the royal finances in particular, but he was not quite the genius of popular legend.
Louis worked beside Colbert for several hours each day, examining every project and helping to draft the edicts. In the early years of the reign, when the treasury was almost bankrupt, he made many self-sacrificing economies, and gave his Controller-General enthusiastic support.
Louis’s reform of the law has been described as the greatest legal work between Justinian and Napoleon. In 1667 the Code Louis was promulgated, simplifying and unifying all French legal procedure. Five more codes followed; a new code of criminal law, which limited the use of torture; a commercial code; a marine code; a code for woods and waters; and even a code for negro slaves in the colonies. The King worked with his ministers—notably the Chancellor Seguier—on these revisions, acquiring a comprehensive knowledge of the realm’s two great legal traditions; the Loi Coutumier or Common Law of northern France, and the Loi Ecrit or Roman Law of France south of the Loire. From the former he derived his deep respect for his subjects’ privileges, from the latter reasoned justification for his Absolutism. Few attempts to understand Louis’s concept of kingship have paid attention to the impression which must have been made upon him by familiarity with the Roman Law and with the God-like rôle which it accords to the Emperor.
The King was much concerned with the enforcement of his new laws. In 1667 he appointed a special magistrate to administer the Paris police. M de la Reynie, who was his Lieutenant of Police for thirty years, trebled the force and introduced night patrols. In addition, street lighting was introduced; every street in Paris was provided with a lamp at each end and in the middle. Generally admired for his honesty and humanity, La Reynie was none the less responsible for what was later called the cabinet noir—censorship of the post and supplying the government with a weekly report on public opinion—and for operating a widespread network of police spies. He also enforced the lettres de cachet or ‘sealed letters’; these were special warrants for arbitrary arrest without trial, which usually meant confinement in the Bastille, though surprisingly few were issued.
During Maria Theresa’s first pregnancy, Louis’s fancy was taken by a seventeen-year-old lady-in-waiting, Louise de la Baume le Blanc, Demoiselle de la Vallière. She was a country girl from Touraine, daughter of an impoverished captain of horse, who had taught her to shoot with a pistol and to use a boar spear. Her skill as a horsewoman and her fondness for hunting attracted Louis. She was an ash-blonde, thin and flat-chested, with a slight limp, rather shy and awkward but noted for her sweet nature. The early days together were spent in hunting expeditions during which the King conducted an idyllic courtship. Louise became his mistress in June 1661, at Fontainebleau, but her ascendancy was not finally established until the affair of Madame, Monsieur’s English wife in the following summer.
The second man in the kingdom, and the one closest to Louis, was his brother, Philippe, whom he made Duc d’Orléans after the unmourned Gaston’s death in 1660. Small, goodlooking, ‘Monsieur’ had features which recalled those of Louis XIII. From his father he inherited a curious sexual makeup, which in his own case became homosexual. Early leanings in this direction were unwittingly indulged by Anne of Austria, who—with Gaston’s unfortunate example in mind—kept the boy in petticoats for far longer than was customary, in the hope of making him more tractable (though tales of perverted practices being deliberately encouraged are nonsense). Like Louis XIII, Monsieur was a natural soldier who showed bravery on several occasions; unlike his father he was cheerful and garrulous—he was said to talk more than several women together. Although Louis loathed sodomites, the two brothers were devoted to each other. Unfortunately, while Louis was able to tolerate Philippe’s eccentricities—ribbons, jewelled bracelets, drenching himself in feminine scents, painting his face, dancing at balls in female costume—he could not approve of a circle of vicious favourites which included the beautiful and malicious Chevalier de Lorraine and the no less evil Comte de Guiche.
To detach Monsieur from these unsavoury catamites, he was married in 1660 to Henrietta of England, Charles II’s favourite sister. Monsieur was not entirely satisfactory as a husband and ‘Madame’, a lively, flirtatious brunette, was unhappy. The King seems to have thought of consoling her himself. So did the insolent and bisexual M de Guiche, who tried unsuccessfully to seduce her in the summer of 1662. Madame remained entirely innocent, but the affair annoyed Louis.
Mlle Louise knew something about the affair—she was a friend of one of Madame’s messengers—but, always loyal, refused to tell the King. He became so angry that she fled to the convent at Chaillot; it was rumoured that she had taken the veil. Louis, horrified, rode hastily to Chaillot where he found her in tears lying on the guest-room floor. She was taken home by a repentant King after an ecstatic reconciliation, and retained possession of his heart for the next five years, presenting him with three children. However, La Vallière was not recognized as mâitresse en titre until his mother’s death in 1666, for fear of shocking Anne of Austria. The King was also considerate enough to spend part of every night in Maria Theresa’s bed. The person who suffered most was Louise, whom Mme de Sevigné called ‘the little violet hiding beneath the grass, ashamed to be a mistress, a mother’.
Louis joined with enthusiasm in Colbert’s encouragement of the arts. His patronage was on a massive scale and was not limited to a mere distribution of pensions. The Academie Française made good its position as supreme arbiter of the language and of letters. Other academies were established—Inscriptions and Belles Lettres in 1663, Science in 1666, Architecture in 1671. The Academy of Painting and Sculpture was reconstituted, to make a much-needed distinction between artists and house-painters, between sculptors and masons. Mazarin’s great library was opened to the public, the Jardin des Plantes extended.
The King’s feeling for style is evident in the polished prose of his memoirs—even Voltaire admired his gift for graceful expression, and considered that his taste had been formed by reading Corneille. Certainly Louis loved the theatre and had the plays of Molière and Racine produced at court. It was the King who decided that the former’s true bent was comedy and not tragedy; Louis was personally responsible for the production of Les Précieuses Ridicules (a play which made startlingly unconventional fun of the period’s fashionable intellectuals); he also helped with Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, arranging for Molière’s introduction to his First Musician, Lully. He had a genuine passion for the French language and undoubtedly enjoyed writers’ company. He was on close terms with Molière, whom he even asked to sit down, an honour rarely accorded to Princes of the Blood, and he was godfather to Molière’s first child. (When Molière died without the Sacraments, Louis saw that he was given Christian burial despite the opposition of the Archbishop of Paris.) He was often read to by Racine and Boileau—the Dr Johnson of the age—whom he made his historiographers. Hearing Boileau in an argument shout, ‘I know more about poetry than the King,’ he commented, ‘Boileau is right—he doesknow more.’
Louis was fond of all the arts. His agents bought so many statues in Rome that the Pope forbade any further export of works of art. From Lully the King commissioned marches and ballet music, operas and motets, tolerating his dirtiness and his drinking. On Lully’s death he appointed François Couperin as his new First Musician (the music of this virtuoso of the clavichord can still convey much of the atmosphere of Louis’s court). An Academy of Music was founded in 1666. The following year a school of painting for Frenchmen was established in Rome. Although the country’s greatest painter, Poussin, refused all invitations to come home, his most important follower, Charles Le Brun, became the King’s First Painter, in which capacity he advised him on almost every aspect of decoration. Besides employing portrait painters like Pierre Mignard and Hyacinthe Rigau, Louis was directly responsible for the rise of a new school of engraving; he ordered that France’s great buildings and treasures should be perpetuated in the Cabinet des Médailles, a national collection of engravings, while he himself posed for such engravers as Nanteuil. He also sat to sculptors, notably Antoine Coysevax.
It was Voltaire who first observed that while the earlier part of Louis XIV’s reign abounded with men of literary genius, the end was a cultural desert, a verdict which has since been repeated ad nauseam. But the decline was hardly the King’s fault; if he could encourage great artists he could hardly be expected to create them. Although Voltaire was not aware of it, one of the greatest of all French writers was secretly at work throughout the later years of the reign; the Duc de Saint-Simon’s memoirs rank with the novels of Proust and Balzac, a masterpiece encapsulating an entire world. And Montesquieu, Buffon and Voltaire himself emerged only just after the reign was over.
Versailles was the supreme expression of Louis’s love of beauty. This palace is often seen as a monument to megalomania, something ‘un-French’. If it is a monument, it was meant as one to the Bourbon dynasty as a whole, intended to outshine the beautiful châteaux of the Valois; even the bluff Henri IV had had plans drawn up for a palace almost as large to be built at Blois. Nor was the choice of Versailles a ‘rejection of Paris’. The Valois had always lived away from the capital, in the Loire valley, and the move was quite in keeping with French tradition. Throughout his reign, Louis continued to beautify Paris; he built the Champs-Elysées, the first boulevards, the Observatory, the Place des Victoires, the Pont Royal, the Louvre Colonnade, the Invalides, the Place Vendôme, and the chapel of the Salpêtrière. He laid out the new street plan for the Faubourgs Saint-Germain and Saint-Honoré and extended the Tuileries. Even after he had moved out to Versailles, the King visited his capital regularly.
Louis’s predilection for Versailles owed something to his father’s memory, and something to his visits there with La Vallière. He began to enlarge it in 1661, though until 1668 the little palace was merely extended. In 1664 he gave an open-air fête at Versailles for Louise, which lasted for seven days and far outshone the Carrousel; its theme was Les Plaisirs de l’Ile Enchanté (a tale taken from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso). Amid the pageants and the tableaux, supper was served by 200 nymphs and shepherds at tables lit by 4,000 flaring torches. Another part of the entertainment was the first production of Molière’s greatest play, Tartuffe.
Versailles in these early days was not yet sufficiently theatrical for the King’s taste. Bernini visited him in 1665 and while his bust of Louis conveys both his good looks and his majesty, the face is as much that of a great actor as of a great King. Louis XIV needed a stage.
The second phase of rebuilding began in 1669. Louis had a complete new palace in mind, but would not allow his architects to demolish Louis XIII’s ‘house of cards’; he told them, ‘If you pull it down I will have it rebuilt brick by brick.’ It had to be included in the new building, enclosed on three sides by an ‘envelope’ of red brick and white stone designed by Le Vau. He soon decided that this second palace was not big enough for anything other than a holiday residence, and a third rebuilding began. Thousands of workmen toiled for years, and so many millions were spent that the sum was made a state secret, but the palace was not fully complete until 1710. It was basically a three-sided building, so big that the garden front had 375 windows. Louis himself, advised by Le Brun, approved every detail of its design and decoration—the gilding and the tiles, the chimneys and the terraces, the marble and the mirrors, the silver furniture and silken tapestries, the urns and sconces.
Although Le Vau designed the original plan, the architect who built Versailles was Jules Hardouin-Mansart—‘a tall, well-built, handsome man of very humble origin but possessing a great deal of natural intelligence’, says Saint-Simon. Louis was not concerned with ‘the vulgarity of his origin’ and became very fond of Mansart, whom he ennobled. On one occasion the King told his courtiers, in the architect’s presence, ‘I can make a score of dukes and peers in a quarter of an hour, but it would take centuries to make a Mansart.’
Of all the mistresses of the French Kings, Françoise-Athénaïs de Montespan was the most formidable. Born in 1640, a daughter of the Duc de Mortemart—his family, the Rochechouart, was one of the oldest and grandest in Poitou—she had married an impoverished rake, the Marquis de Montespan. Like her mother in the previous reign, she became a lady-in-waiting, pleasing the Queen by her apparent piety. She soon endeared herself to Louise de la Vallière as a reassuring confidante. However, as early as 1666 she was having diabolical prayers said by witches to help her seduce the King. At first Louis did not seem interested—perhaps he realized that she was dangerous. While Athénais was very beautiful, dark and sensuous, with violet eyes, scarlet lips and an adorable figure (despite a tendency to plumpness), she was also both wild and arrogant, a compulsive gambler who was heavily in debt; and she combined a savage wit with a vile temper. In any case, she had two children and her proud and fiery husband would not be a willing cuckold. Athénais hid her ambition, biding her time, confident not only of her prayers but also of her charms. For Athénais was not only beautiful, she was interesting. Sophisticated, with a discerning taste in luxury, she dressed delightfully; even more important, she was extremely well-read and spoke exquisite French with a turn of phrase which was admired by Saint-Simon.
In the summer of 1667, during the invasion of Flanders, the King finally became her lover. La Vallière, who had recently been made a Duchess, and who was always trustful, suspected nothing. M de Montespan was furious and beat his wife; dressed in mourning, he drove to court with two great cuckold’s horns waving from the roof of his carriage. The King banished him. Louise was deserted, but to preserve the proprieties was forced to stay at court and retain the title of maitresse en titre—she still travelled in Louis’s carriage with the Queen and Athénais. (These could be dreadful journeys for the ladies-in-waiting, as the King would not let them stop the carriage when they wished to relieve themselves.) Louise was allowed to depart in 1674, whereupon she entered a notoriously strict Carmelite convent where she remained—as Soeur Marie de la Miséricorde—until her death in 1710. When told that her son, the Duc de Vermandois, had died, she commented, ‘I mourn his birth even more than his death.’
Athénais held the King for twelve years. She worked hard to do so, dyeing her hair blonde because he liked it better than brown; dieting (Mme de Sévigné once noted that she came back after an absence from court half her size) and having herself rubbed down with scent; patriotically, she dressed in French silks and velvets. To begin with, her life with Louis was an exuberant idyll. Voracious in bed, she satisfied his once insatiable sexual appetite. She accompanied him when he inspected the frontiers in 1678, even though she was pregnant. He adored children, so she presented him with seven (who were put in the care of her dear friend, Mme Scarron). He rewarded her richly, making her father Governor of Paris, paying her gambling debts and buying her wonderful jewels. He built her a fabulous château, Clagny (specially designed by Mansart) where to please him she made a garden filled with jonquils and jasmine, his favourite flowers. (The King was so fond of jasmine that sometimes the entire floor of his bedroom was covered with it.) Everybody else loathed her. Success made her intolerably haughty and unbridled her vicious tongue. Not even the King was spared, and he almost abandoned her in 1672 and again in 1674. To keep him, so it was later alleged, she commissioned blasphemous spells and gave him toad excrement as an aphrodisiac; she was even accused of having a Black Mass, during which a baby was sacrificed, said over her naked body. By the mid-1670s the King was tiring of her. Totally unsubmissive, she reacted violently to his many infidelities. He ceased to sleep with her in 1678, though the final breach did not come till later.
Military glory remained for Louis infinitely desirable. In the brutal Marquis de Louvois, the King had a wonderful Minister of War, whose reforms served France until the Revolution. Louvois introduced regimental uniforms, badges of rank, portable pontoon bridges and standardized artillery. For the first time the ordinary French soldier was regularly paid, well fed from field kitchens and had a chance of rising from the ranks. Louvois was responsible for the foundation of the Hôtel des Invalides—in its day the best old soldiers’ home in the world—and of three schools of artillery, together with cadet companies for training young officers. He introduced grenadiers and hussars, replaced the pike by the musket and plug bayonet, and made the troops march in step to airs on the fife and drums specially composed by Lully. Hitherto the French had considered cavalry as the only soldiering fit for gentlemen; now Louis forbade anyone to join the cavalry without having first served in the infantry. A Corps of Engineers was set up to assist the great Vauban, who in 1663 had deeply impressed the King by his fortifications at Dunkirk, Vauban’s principle being that the lower defences were, the less likely they were to be hit by enemy artillery.
The King restrained himself until this army had begun to take shape—and until Colbert had amassed sufficient funds. By 1667 he was ready. Philip IV of Spain had died in 1665, succeeded by the child Charles II. In May Louis suddenly overran southern Flanders, claiming that the province belonged to his wife as the child of Philip IV’s first marriage, Charles being only the child of the second (the pretext gave the campaign its name, the ‘War of Devolution’). In February 1668 Louis also invaded Franche Comté. England, Sweden and the United Provinces, who had been watching with considerable apprehension, quickly formed a Triple Alliance. In May he was forced to withdraw from Franche Comté, though he kept the towns he had won in Flanders.
The Triple Alliance infuriated Louis. The Dutch, who were its real architects, had already affronted him by responding to Colbert’s tariffs with surcharges on all French wines, spirits and manufactured goods, while the activities of the Bank of Amsterdam were seriously depleting French currency. By the spring of 1672 he had isolated them from their allies, paying Sweden a large annual subsidy and sending Charles II of England a secret pension; in the latter case Louis’s agent was Madame, who, just before her death in 1670, persuaded her brother to ally with France.
The French army was now stronger than it had ever been, with nearly 120,000 highly trained soldiers. Voltaire describes Louis’s newly formed household troops: ‘There were four companies of life-guards, each comprising three hundred gentlemen, among whom were many young cadets, unpaid, but subject like everyone else to the strict rules of the service; there were also two hundred guardsmen, two hundred light horse, five hundred musketeers, all of gentle birth, young and of good appearance; twelve companies of men-at-arms, afterwards increased to sixteen; the hundred Swiss guards accompanied the King, and his regiments of French and Swiss guards mounted guard in front of his house and tent.’ These troops, the Maison du Roi, whose uniforms were covered with gold and silver, became the crack troops of the Ancien Régime.
Besides Condé, the King had the services of another great captain, Turennes. Although the Dutch possessed the most formidable navy in the world, they had pitifully few troops. France declared war in April 1672, and in June the French cavalry swam the Rhine, Louis and the infantry following over their new pontoon bridge. The King, in jack-boots, a leather coat and a red-plumed hat, shared his men’s rations but insisted on full ceremonial and used his tent as an audience chamber. By the end of the month Turennes had turned the Dutch line of defence, and Amsterdam was only twenty miles away. The Dutch fell back on their last resource, breaking down the dykes and flooding all the country around Amsterdam. Then they begged for peace.
Louis’s terms were too much—a crushing indemnity and a large slice of territory. On hearing them, the Dutch overthrew the government of de Witt—he and his brother were torn to pieces by a mob—and replaced them with the young Prince of Orange who was appointed Stadtholder. By now all Europe went in fear of Louis, and the Dutch found new allies—Brandenburg and the Empire at the end of 1672, Spain and Lorraine in 1673, Denmark and the Rhine Palatinate in 1674.
Withdrawing from Holland, Louis struck swiftly at the Spanish and conquered Franche Comté in six weeks, this time for good. Turennes laid waste to the Palatinate, burning two towns and twenty villages, and destroying vineyards, crops and livestock so that the enemy would be without supplies. When the Germans invaded Alsace at the end of 1674, Turennes drove them back in a terrible winter campaign, inflicting 40,000 casualties; while Condé repelled a Dutch and Spanish invasion. Next year the French were not so successful. A stray cannonball killed Turennes (Louis buried him in the royal sepulchre at Saint-Denis). Condé drove the Germans out of Alsace for a second time, but France was growing tired. Despite Colbert’s striving, taxes had risen to enormous heights—the war was costing France something like £ 30 million a year—and there were sporadic risings among the Breton peasants.
The war dragged on for three more weary years, during which the French won some slight victories—Monsieur, painted and powdered as always, defeated the Prince of Orange at Mont Cassel by a courageous gamble, much to the King’s jealousy. Meanwhile Louis was waging a most skilful diplomatic campaign; setting the Dutch against the Spanish and attacking the latter in Italy; stirring up rebellion in Hungary; he even managed to foment quarrels between the Dutch republicans and the Stadtholder’s supporters. Louis’s enemies grew even wearier of the war than the French. A peace conference met at Nijmegen in the summer of 1678 and was brilliantly handled by Louis’s diplomats. A treaty signed in August gave him Franche Comté and twelve towns in Flanders—the latter constituting a valuable reinforcement to France’s weak northern frontier—and Nancy. A separate treaty with Holland reduced the French tariffs, though it did not abolish them entirely. Nijmegen was an undoubted triumph for Louis and his policy of aggression.
The years which followed Nijmegen were the zenith of Louis’s glory. In 1680 the Parlement of Paris bestowed upon him the title of ‘The Great’. When the poor Queen died in 1683 Bossuet, in his funeral oration, spoke not only of her ‘piété incomparable’ but also of ‘les imortelles actions de Louis le Grand’. Versailles was a fitting shrine. The King moved in permanently in May 1682. The following year Mme de Sévigné, visiting it for the first time, wrote ecstatically, ‘Tout est grand, tout est magnifique.’ The King’s chief joy was the vast garden created by André le Nôtre. Louis loved to stroll through geometrically-arranged terraces, down countless avenues, over the lawns (or ‘green carpets’) shaded by carefully planted groves, along great canals and lakes. There were a thousand fountains and innumerable statues. He enjoyed chatting with the charming Le Nôtre or with M de la Quintinie, the amiable kitchen gardener, or visiting the orangery to see his beloved orange trees (he was so fond of these trees that he even had them in his rooms, in silver tubs). The King wrote a little guide to the gardens, so that sightseers would know the correct sequence in which to visit them. Louis spent nearly as much time in his gardens as he did hunting.
His Versailles was a return to the Dijon of the medieval Dukes of Burgundy, to the Fontainebleau of François I. Far from being a Spanish importation, its ceremony was essentially French, with rules laid down by Henri III in 1585. Louis merely brought them up to date. There had to be more functionaries because the court now numbered thousands instead of hundreds. The ritual quality of life at Versailles was due not so much to the ceremonies as to Louis’s own awe-inspiring personality.
To his subjects no King could have seemed less remote. Every day thousands of Parisians rode out in special public conveyances to see him eating or walking at his new palace. (It was rather as though Queen Elizabeth II lunched daily in public at Hampton Court.) Anyone dressed like a gentleman and wearing a sword was admitted to the gardens—swords could be hired at the gates for a small fee—while the royal apartments were frequently open to the public. Louis greeted everyone politely. This gift of living gracefully in public was largely responsible for the extraordinary popularity which he enjoyed during the greater part of his reign.
He was awakened at about eight in the morning. Having greeted the few courtiers privileged to have the grande entrée, he said the Office of the Holy Spirit. He then dressed, each garment being handed to him with ceremony after which he wiped his face and hands on a napkin soaked in spirits of wine; on alternate mornings he was shaved. (He seldom took baths but changed his clothes, including his linen, three times a day.) His breakfast consisted of white bread, and hot wine and water or sage tea. He then said more prayers and completed his dressing. The Lever was now over. After giving orders for the day, he heard Mass. There followed a meeting of the Council or audiences. The King dined at one o’clock, alone and in public at a square table. He ate a comparatively light meal with plenty of fruit and vegetables, which he washed down with the still, grey champagne of Bouzy. (The fizzy variety was not yet known at court, though Dom Perignon had just invented it.) In the afternoon Louis either slept with his current mistress or took some other exercise. Often he hunted or went shooting on foot, being an excellent shot. After breaking his arm in 1683, he took to following hounds in a fast wagonette which he drove himself, or spent more time walking in his beloved gardens. When he returned, he recommenced work in his study. Supper was often served as late as eleven-thirty pm. It was Louis’s main meal, and he ate enormously; in the old-fashioned way he never used a fork, eating with his fingers. Finally there was an entertainment—music, dancing, cards or billiards or some other gambling game. He usually went to bed at about one in the morning, with no less ceremony than at his rising.
Versailles was the instrument by which Louis tamed the upper nobility. He drew them to court with an unending series of entertainments and also by the lure of titles and pensions; these were of vital importance to an aristocracy which was to a large extent impoverished. Versailles was the only road to preferment and promotion; there were posts to be had in the royal household and in the Dauphin’s household, commissions in the army, bishoprics, abbeys, canonries. Once at court, noblemen grew still poorer, from gambling or from having to buy splendid clothes. If they would not come, Louis ordered the Intendant in their province to make life difficult for them. Within a few years the dangerous war-lords, who only recently had terrorized France, were transformed into foppish courtiers, grateful for gifts to relieve their debt-ridden lives. There was only one plot against his government during the entire reign.
Louis has frequently been accused of destroying the French ruling class, but it will have been seen in the preceding chapters that he had good reason for doing so. Nor did he only make fops of his nobles: the courtiers of Versailles were moulded into an officer corps—each one could be called to the colours at a moment’s notice. In addition they frequently acted as commission agents, who for a given fee would procure an audience of the King to interest him in some commercial or scientific project, rather like modern public relations men.
If Louis was often responsible for financially ruining his nobles, he could show great kindness in individual cases. Mme de Sévigné tells us that when Marshal de Bellefonds came to the King in 1672 to resign his post at court, Louis took him aside and asked, ‘Monsieur le Maréchal, why do you want to leave me? Has it to do with religion? Or do you simply want to retire? Is it your heavy debts? If it is the latter, I will settle them and must know more about your affairs.’ The Marshal replied, ‘Sire, it is my debts. I am ruined. I cannot let my friends, who have helped me, suffer because I’m unable to pay them.’ ‘In that case,’ said the King, ‘their debts must be made good. I’m going to give you 100,000 francs for your house at Versailles and a guarantee of 400,000 francs which will serve as a surety should you die. You can pay off what you owe with the 100,000 francs—and then you can stay in my service.’
To read the memoirs of Saint-Simon—who hated him—is to experience something of Louis XIV’s strange fascination. ‘Never did a man use his words, his smiles, even his mere glances, with more grace,’ wrote the Duke grudgingly; ‘no man was ever more polite by instinct or more correct, or knew better how to honour age, merit or rank … his smallest gesture, his walk, his bearing, were all most fitting and becoming, being noble, grand and majestic, and yet perfectly natural.’ Louis knew not only how to overawe, but also how to charm. When an old courtier asked him for permission to leave Versailles, the King answered, ‘We have known each other for too long to say good-bye at our age, when we cannot hope to find new friends—don’t desert me!’ The compliment he paid to the aged Condé, who was having difficulty in climbing the stairs at Versailles, is legendary: ‘One who carries such a weight of laurels can only move slowly.’ These compliments were paid in a voice which was at once dignified and charming. He was elegant even in his rages; having been grossly insulted by a certain nobleman, the King threw his cane out of the window, saying, ‘I should be sorry to strike a man of quality.’ Above all, says Saint-Simon, ‘he had no equal with women’. He had an ineffable way of half-raising himself at supper for each lady who arrived at table. He never passed the humblest petticoat without raising his hat, not even chambermaids. (The honnête homme, or French gentleman, of the period could be surprisingly polite to servants—the Duc de Beauvilliers apologized to his coachman if he kept him waiting.)
Louis’s chief fault was his ferocious amour propre. The ambassador of the Elector of Brandenburg, Ezekiel Spannheim, noted in 1690 that the King was ‘jealous to the smallest detail of his authority, excessively touchy about everything which concerns it or could harm it’. All the same, says Herr Spannheim, ‘he is easily influenced by advisers and adopts their policies.’ Nothing could be further from the truth than the claim (which he never made) ‘l’état, c’est moi’. The ‘state’ of Louis XIV was the bureaucracy which he created—his Council of a few all-powerful ministers, and theIntendants, each of whom was supreme in his province, overriding the Governor, the Parlement and the municipalities. These chosen servants often acted without their master realizing fully what they were about. As the years went by, however, Louis paid more and more attention to business, working as much as ten hours a day.
By the 1680s Louis was middle-aged and running to fat. His face was lined and sagging; because of the removal of several teeth from his upper jaw—the doctors broke it, smashing his palate—his mouth was shrunken, with pursed lips. He had shaved off his moustache and in place of his own long hair wore a full-bottomed periwig. Sometimes his eyes looked tired, even in official portraits. In 1686 his health was cruelly tested by a terrible operation for an anal fistula; on two occasions, fully conscious, he bore being cut many times, without a sound. Also he probably weakened himself by excessive purges (usually camomile or rhubarb). Yet he kept his huge appetite for food and women, and his love of exercise. At this period he dressed plainly, in a neat brown coat, with a waistcoat of red, green or blue, and the Cordon Bleu of the Saint-Esprit. Maturity made him more imposing than ever.
He was not only adored by his subjects, but was the most admired man in Christendom; as Voltaire says, ‘Louis was looked on as the only King in Europe.’ Every European sovereign built his own Versailles, copied its etiquette and furniture and learnt to speak French. Schönbrunn in Austria, Het Loo in Holland, the garden façade of Hampton Court, still bear witness to their admiration. Foreigners flocked in crowds to see King Louis.
There were now new personalities at court. ‘Monseigneur’, as the Dauphin was known, was very tall, fat and yellow-haired. Dull, lazy, but unusually good-natured, he bore little resemblance to his father, who overawed him. Having been beaten and crammed by his tutors, Monseigneur detested books, although he collected pictures and furniture in his exquisite flat at Versailles and enjoyed good music. He lacked any aptitude for soldiering, but loved wolf-hunting above all else, exterminating wolves in the Ile de France. A shy man, he preferred to live quietly at Meudon with his ugly Bavarian wife, to whom he was devoted, until she succumbed to melancholia. They had three sons—the Dukes of Burgundy, Anjou and Berry. When his wife died in 1690, he married a certain Mlle de Choin, whose greatest charm, in the Dauphin’s eyes, was her enormous bosom. If he had little influence, Monseigneur was none the less often to be seen at court, for his father was fond of him.
Louis liked all his children, including his bastards whom he legitimized, though they did not rank as Princes of the Blood. Of these the most important was his eldest son by Athénais—Louis-Auguste, whom the King made Duc du Maine. Sickly, limping and ineffectual, he failed miserably in his ambition to be a great soldier; he turned out both cowardly and boastful. (Even so, Saint-Simon’s portrait of him is a spiteful caricature.) Louis married him to one of Condé’s granddaughters. His brother, the Comte de Toulouse, was also a dull creature, but proved reasonably successful as a naval officer. He too was found a wealthy wife, one of the Noailles.
There was a nasty little scandal in 1682, when a homosexual clique was discovered at Versailles. It included Louis’s son by La Vallière, the fifteen-year-old Duc de Vermandois, who had been corrupted by the Chevalier de Lorraine. Vermandois was treated with such contempt by the King that he left court of his own accord and joined the army. A sickly boy, he died the following year.
The most colourful arrival at court was Monsieur’s second wife (Madame had died in 1670), Liselotte von der Pfalz—the Princess-Palatine. This ugly German blonde with the figure of a Swiss Guard, was a convert from Protestantism, fat and red-faced, fond of dogs, beer and sausages, and much disliked by the court—a dislike which she heartily reciprocated. If unintel-lectual, Liselotte was brutally shrewd and observant, and her letters give a vivid picture of life at Versailles. Neither she nor Monsieur, now grown pot-bellied and stilted, but still festooned with diamonds and obsessed with his complexion, were exactly in love but they did their duty; after many failures Philippe managed to beget a son by—so he believed, according to his wife—rubbing his manhood with a holy medal.
The most formidable member of the King’s new circle was his own second wife. Queen Maria Theresa died in 1683, her health undermined by pregnancies, killed by the excessive bleeding ordered by the doctors. (Colbert died the same year, sad and disillusioned.) Louis, to the court’s astonishment, wept bitterly. He had been faithful to her for the last two years, even after being badly shaken by the death of a young mistress, Marie Angélique de Fontanges, in 1681. Among the friends of Mme de Montespan was a dark, statuesque widow in her forties, Mme Françoise Scarron. She was the granddaughter of Agrippa d’Aubigné, Henri IV’s old henchman. Her father was a ne’er-do-well who had murdered his first wife, and Françoise had been born in prison, her mother being the governor’s daughter. Since then her life had been as unusual as it was poverty-stricken. As a young girl, having been abandoned by her parents after a sojourn in Martinique where her father died, she was converted to Catholicism. At sixteen she married a crippled and disreputable poet, Paul Scarron, partly from pity, partly from poverty. Although the marriage could not be consummated, she was happy enough, gathering a little salon around her in their house in the Marais. However, Scarron died when she was twenty-four, leaving her almost penniless. Luckily, the Queen Mother, who had been one of Scarron’s patrons, took pity on the pretty young widow and gave her a pension. Pious, yet none the less fond of the beau monde, Mme Scarron took up residence in a fashionable convent where she filled her time with good works and embroidery. She knew many people at court and was recommended to Athénais as a suitable person to bring up her children. One of nature’s governesses, she did this so efficiently and showed such discretion that the King rewarded her with a marquisate and the little estate of Maintenon.
Louis first began to know her well during their mutual concern over the health of the little Duc de Maine. He had started by disliking her, but eventually he came to admire her strong mysterious character and Junoesque figure. With her fine eyes and sober, enigmatic charm, dressed in elegant black with a becoming widow’s cap, she was far from unattractive. Eventually he fell in love with her, but to his amazement the former widow Scarron refused to sleep with him; it was she who persuaded him to return to the Queen’s bed. When Maria Theresa died, the King married Mme de Maintenon in secret—the date has never been discovered, but it was probably some time in 1684. He needed her: ‘When a man leaves his youth behind him, he nearly always requires the companionship of a woman of even temper’, is Voltaire’s comment. Françoise did not find her exalted position one of unalloyed enjoyment—Louis, still voracious, must have been an exhausting husband for a middle-aged woman who was probably still a virgin. It is the measure of her remarkable personality that this new, morganatic wife was accepted without demur by the royal family and by the court.
For over thirty years the King showed an unwavering taste for domesticity. Although Mme de Maintenon complained of his unflagging virility, he was never once unfaithful. She rarely ventured out of her apartments, so her bedroom became his office; their two chairs were on each side of the fireplace, separated by Louis’s table where he worked at his state papers. She set up a little theatre next door to her flat; here courtiers performed carefully chosen plays. Under her sober influence Louis grew pious. Operas were forbidden during Lent, and everyone had to communicate at Easter—people were rebuked for talking during Mass. Saint-Simon says that the court, in its efforts to please, ‘sweated hypocrisy’. There was something a little sanctimonious about Mme de Maintenon. She favoured people one moment, only to cast them off the next. None the less she kept her place by her piety and won her ‘battle for the King’s soul’.
Although Mme de Montespan had finally lost the King, she lingered on at court for several years, growing enormously fat (an Italian observer says that her thigh became as thick as a man’s waist). She had finally been discredited in Louis’s eyes by the great Poisoning Scandal, of which details first began to emerge in 1679, when the arrest of the mass murderess, Mme de Brinvilliers, led to the discovery of a vast network of professional poisoners and witches. During the panic which followed, the King established theChambre Ardente (or ‘Council for Burning’) which accused some of the highest personages in France of murder and black magic, among them Marshal Luxembourg. Over 400 suspects were arrested and more than 200 were found guilty, thirty-six being executed (some were actually burnt). The court was abruptly dissolved in 1682 when Louis realized that Athénais might be involved—there were rumours of love philtres to secure his affections, of poisoned phials to remove rivals. Louis had the evidence destroyed. Eventually ‘dreadful and ignominious Maintenon’ harried ‘thundering and incomparable Montespan’ into leaving court. Like La Vallière, Athénais ended in a convent, where she died with decorous piety.
Mme de Maintenon has been blamed for the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, but the King would have revoked the edict in any case. At the beginning of the reign, despite the loss of its military privileges, French Protestantism still remained something of a state within a state. Meanwhile the Gallican Church, laity as well as clergy, was increasingly critical—the Huguenots’ privileged position made a striking contrast with the hysterical persecution of Catholics in the three kingdoms across the Channel. As early as 1669 measures were taken to make life difficult for French Protestants. In 1681 they were forbidden to enter government service. In 1682 when risings began in areas where the Reformed Faith was strong, dragoons were billeted in their houses with orders to behave as badly as possible (behaviour which included rape and torture). In 1685 the King at last revoked the Edict, orders being given for the destruction of all Protestant ‘Temples’ and for all ministers to leave France within a fortnight, or be sent to the galleys.
Out of two million Huguenots, probably 300,000 left France. Many were skilled artisans so it is often said that the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes postponed the French Industrial Revolution by a century. In addition, more than 600 officers left the army for foreign service. In fact the exodus had surprisingly little effect on the French economy (except in a few specialized crafts such as watchmaking, though even here for hardly more than a decade). The loss of army officers was soon made good by Irish Catholics fleeing from the persecution of the Williamite government. From his own special point of view, Louis was amply repaid by the thunderous applause of the greater part of his subjects.
Paradoxically, he himself was inclined to be tolerant. At one moment he had even hoped that Rome would make doctrinal concessions to the Protestant Churches. The real motive for his persecution of the Huguenots was an anxiety to demonstrate that he was the true leader of the Catholic world; here a certain jealousy may be discerned, of the Emperor and the Polish King who were winning spectacular victories over the Turks. His natural tolerance was shown in 1670 when he took the Jews of Metz under his personal protection, and when he ordered that any criminal charges against Jews must be brought before the Royal Council. In 1687 he told a Siamese embassy that God had given men religions of slightly different hue—‘as the green leaves of a tree subtly vary in colour’.
To the King, the Jansenists, with their fierce criticism of fellow Catholics, seemed just as troublesome as the Huguenots. This austere and noble sect took its name from Bishop Cornelius Jansen, a theologian who had died in 1640 and whose writings were taken up by French admirers; the basis of his teaching was that most men were damned and that only those few whom God had predestined would be saved. In practice Jansenism, with its terrifying consciousness of sin and the fruitlessness of human effort, led its followers to practise a harsh and uncompromising personal religion. The movement centred round a small community of devout gentlemen who settled near the Jansenist convent of Port Royal outside Paris. It soon attracted a distinguished following, including Pascal and later Racine. When in 1653 the Pope condemned five propositions which had been attributed to Jansen, the Jansenists said that they were not to be found in his book. Then the Jansenists attacked the Jesuits for their emphasis on Free Will. Louis, no theologian, could not grasp the finer points of the interminable quarrel. However, many prominent Jansenists had been enthusiastic Frondeurs and he discerned the same rebellious note in their attitude towards the Papacy. As an inveterate optimist himself, he must have found their extreme pessimism distasteful. In 1679 he forbade Port Royal to take novices, and at the end of his reign had the remaining nuns evicted and the convent demolished. In 1713, at the King’s request, Rome categorically condemned Jansenist beliefs.
Once Louis decided that any institution or belief was divisive, he was merciless. A new form of Quietism—the ancient doctrine that all that is necessary for salvation is a passive love of God—was propagated by a certain Mme Guyon, an unbalanced mystic who went in for ecstasies. When Mme Guyon’s lectures to the girls of the school at Saint-Cyr, founded by Mme de Maintenon, resulted in outbreaks of mass hysteria, the King quickly came to the conclusion that her beliefs were a threat to public morality. However, she had a powerful ally in the elegant and saintly Fénelon, Archbishop of Cambrai, who published a partial defence of her views, his Maximes des Saints. The book was attacked by Bossuet and ultimately condemned by the Pope. Fénelon was banished to his diocese, while Mme Guyon was shut up in a convent.
Fénelon had been tutor to the Duke of Burgundy, the Dauphin’s eldest son. Born in 1682, Louis de Bourgogne had grown up learned and hard-working; he stooped from too much study and was thin from fasting. Devout and a would-be philosopher, he was genuinely charitable, and on one occasion sold his mother’s jewels to provide assistance for impoverished army officers. The Brandenburger Spannheim thought ‘there was never a Prince of such promise’. What particularly struck him was the contrast between the Duke’s cheerful, vivacious nature and the fact that he spoke little. The King found Bourgogne far more congenial than the Dauphin, despite the Duke’s admiration for Fénelon.
Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704), Bishop of Meaux, was in many ways the reign’s most representative churchman. In his writings, this pillar of Gallican orthodoxy expressed the religious attitude of most Frenchmen of his time. The ‘Eagle of Meaux’ was loud in his praise when Louis revoked the Edict of Nantes, but from a dislike of extremism and dissension rather than from intolerance. His own religion was a balanced and generous French Catholicism which was all but anti-Roman; he drew up the ‘Four Articles’ which re-affirmed the independence of the Church of France from that of Rome; the ‘Pope of Gallicanism’ even showed a certain interest in the Church of England. Tall, white-haired, majestic, he was a familiar figure at Versailles. He moved courtiers to tears with his beautiful sermons, making an art form of the funeral oration (his oraisons funèbres, particularly those on the deaths of Queen Henrietta Maria and Madame, have something of the sad and stately measures of Purcell’s ‘Music for the Death of Queen Mary’).
It says a good deal for the French Church of Louis XIV that it could produce men of the calibre of Bossuet and Fénelon. There were many other great churchmen—notably Dom Rancé, the ‘Thundering Abbot’ of the Trappists.
Bossuet was the classical exponent of French Absolutism. He claimed to discern a ‘loi fondamental’ by which the King and his subjects accepted each other’s rights and privileges as immutable and unchallengeable (this acceptance was the ultimate basis of theAncien Régime). The King was indeed God’s image on earth, the only source of law, yet if he acted immorally or ignored his subjects’ rights he ceased to be an absolute monarch and became a mere despot. The distinction was one which Louis XIV undoubtedly recognized.
In his foreign policy, however, Louis showed less respect for other peoples’ rights. Between 1679 and 1686, he bloodlessly acquired the remainder of Alsace, the Saar and much of Lorraine by means of the Chambres de Réunion—special legal tribunals who disinterred ancient treaties to justify French occupation. His new towns were made into strongholds by Vauban; Strasbourg (which had been entered by a combination of bribery and intimidation) becoming the strongest fortress in Europe. The King also laid claim to towns in the United Provinces and in the Spanish Netherlands. This aggressive foreign policy, together with an ostentatious build-up of the French army and navy, alarmed all Europe. In the summer of 1686, the League of Augsburg was formed against France—eventually it included the Emperor, most of the German Princes, Spain, Sweden, the Dutch and England. The Nine Years War opened early in 1689. Louis’s greatest enemy was the new Dutch Stadtholder, William of Orange, whom the Glorious Revolution had just made King of England. Louis’s main objective was to break the Dutch and turn William III out of England, even if it meant fighting on five fronts.
Poor James II had been driven out of his kingdom but was not without supporters among his former subjects. Although he used James as a political tool and was well aware of his faults, Louis had a genuine affection for a brother monarch whom he had known since he was a small boy. A magnificent welcome awaited the exiled court at Saint-Germain, which was put at James’s disposal. Mary of Modena was waited on as if she were Queen of France and given presents of gold and silver plate, jewellery, silks and velvets; a purse of 10,000 golden louis was on her dressing-table. King James received a pension large enough for him to keep his entire household. The French navy soon drove the English off the sea, routing their main fleet at Beachy Head. A French Armada took James and a Jacobite army to Ireland, which had remained loyal. As anticipated, this second front caused William III the utmost alarm. Unfortunately King James had lost his nerve; without enough experienced troops, he was easily defeated at the Boyne and fled to France once more. The Irish fought on bravely for two more years but the Jacobite cause was doomed.
In Germany the French at first conquered all before them. In February 1689, determined to knock the Elector Palatine out of the war, Louis issued an order to his troops to reduce the Palatinate to ashes. The real author of the order was Louvois, who, as Voltaire said, ‘had become less humane through that hardening of sensibilities which a lengthy ministry produces.’ The beautiful Rhineland went up in flames and Mannheim and Heidelberg were gutted; any Germans remaining in their ruined houses were butchered; 100,000 refugees fled north and east. German hatred of the French is often said to date from this campaign. In Italy, after several bloody reverses, the French conquered all Savoy save Turin.
Louis had excellent commanders in Marshals Catinat and Luxembourg. It was Catinat who conquered Savoy, while Luxembourg became known as the ‘tapissier de Nôtre-Dame’, so many were the enemy flags and standards which he brought home in triumph. In 1690 near Fleurus in Flanders he killed 6,000 of the enemy, taking 8,000 prisoners; in 1691 he took Mons; in 1692 Namur, the strongest fortress in the Low Countries, the King being present. At Steinkirk and Neerwinden (1692 and 1693), two more glorious victories were won, though the casualties were so frightful that people said De Profundis ought to be sung, rather than Te Deum. Unfortunately Luxembourg died in 1695, just when the Dutch were beginning to recover. The French also did well in Spain where the Duc de Vendôme captured Barcelona. The French navy ruled the waves after a brief reverse and French privateers harried English ships and raided Jamaica and Newfoundland. Newfoundland was almost conquered by the Comte de Frontenac and his Canadiens(though at that date the entire population of New France was only 11,000 souls). But for all the bloody battles, all the marching and counter-marching, neither France nor her enemies could win.
Louis was anxious to break up the League of Augsburg before the question of the Spanish Succession would have to be settled. He therefore bought off the Duke of Savoy by returning his Duchy. The League dissolved. At the Treaty of Ryswick, signed at the end of 1697, France gave up Lorraine and most of her conquests in Germany and the Low Countries, besides recognizing William III as King of England. Colbert’s tariffs were abolished. But she retained Strasbourg and other strong-points on the Rhine frontier, and in America gained the Hudson Bay and most of Newfoundland.
Louis took advantage of the peace to redecorate Marly. For Louis XIV, this château—twelve little pavilions flanking a tiny palace—was what the original Versailles had been for his father. Here he relaxed among the people he liked best, etiquette being much less formal than elsewhere, and picnicked with parties of ladies in the woods. At Marly he indulged his passion for tulips; four million a year were imported from Holland. The château’s new decorations, by Pierre Lepautre, are an early example of rococo.
The treaty with Savoy brought to France the last of Louis’s great loves. This was Marie Adelaide, ‘The Rose of Savoy’, not yet twelve years old, who arrived in 1696 to marry the King’s grandson, the Duc de Bourgogne. The King went to meet her. He wrote enthusiastically to Mme de Maintenon, ‘She is very graceful and has the most perfect figure I have ever seen, dressed as if ready to sit for her portrait, with bright, beautiful eyes, admirable black eyelashes, as clear a pink and white complexion as could be desired, and the loveliest flaxen hair and plenty of it …’ Louis continued, ‘I find her exactly what I would wish and should be sorry if she were more beautiful.’ Until her marriage was consummated in 1699, Marie Adelaide lived with the King and Mme de Maintenon as a daughter, attending the school at Saint-Cyr. According to Saint-Simon, Mme de Maintenon, whom she called ‘Aunt’, treated her as a little doll. Louis adored the child; he took her for walks every day and let her sit on his lap and rumple his wig. She remained his favourite when she grew up plain but still vivacious. Marie Adelaide was the idol of the court—even Saint-Simon admired her. Giddy and flighty, hopelessly lacking in decorum, she had many flirtations though they were innocent enough, and was fond of rather coarse practical jokes. The King never scolded her and allowed her to run into his office at any moment of the day and rummage through his papers—she was the one person who was never frightened of him. At first her husband bored her, but then she fell in love and became a devoted wife. They had three children; a short-lived Duc de Bretagne, another Bretagne and the Duc d’Anjou (the future Louis XV).
As early as 1680 Colbert had warned the King of terrible poverty in the provinces. War was exhausting the country, and when the Controller-General died a broken man in 1683, the budget was in deficit to the tune of sixteen million livres (over £ 1,500,000 in contemporary English money). By 1689 Louis was in even worse difficulties and had to sell the silver furniture at Versailles. By the end of the Nine Years War the deficit was 138 million livres. Yet direct taxation and internal customs had already been increased, while a new tax, the capitation (a graduated poll tax) had been introduced in 1695; it was the first French taxation to be based on personal wealth. Titles and offices were being sold at an unheard-of extent; 500 bourgeois bought titles in 1696 alone (the price was 2,000 crowns). Apart from further loans from abroad at crippling interest, more cash could only be found by issuing paper money and then devaluing it, by a carefully contrived state bankruptcy, by forced loans and by lotteries. The need for money to pay for the war had coincided with a depression; corn prices were low, wine producers were cut off from their foreign markets and the shortage of raw materials from abroad caused unemployment. In 1694 Fénelon, addressing the King, wrote, ‘Your people are dying of hunger … France is nothing but a vast hospital.’
La Bruyère’s famous description of French peasants at this time still appalls. ‘Sullen beasts, male and female, who, black with dirt and white with hunger, live on black bread, grapes and water in lairs.’ But modern research shows that their misery was due to a phenomenal succession of bad harvests rather than to conscription or to money squandered on the King’s wars. The savagely inequitable tax system harried them in bad years as in good, so that even prosperous roturiers dressed in rags to conceal any appearance of wealth.
Louis no longer possessed ministers of the same calibre as Colbert and Louvois. Instead he had men like Chamillart (a protégé of Mme de Maintenon), who was excellent at billiards, but no good as an administrator, and who allowed himself to be bribed by contractors and even sold military decorations. Saint-Simon believed that Chamillart only kept his post because the King felt sorry for him and enjoyed correcting his mistakes.
However, Louis was still his own First Minister. Contrary to what has been alleged, he showed both realism and flexibility during the latter part of his reign. Recent research has considerably altered the old picture of his last years as a period of stagnation and decline. At home Louis was so active in encouraging French commerce that the period after 1697 has even been described as a second era of economic reform comparable with that under Colbert. In fact he was far more imaginative than Colbert had ever been. Monopolies were attacked, with other obstacles to trade; there was an attempt to simplify internal customs barriers; a scheme for a uniform system of weights and measures. The King tried to raise the social status of French merchants, encouraging noblemen to take part not only in overseas but also—and vainly—in domestic trade. No one, not even nobles, was exempt from the capitation; later the nobility also had to pay another tax, the dixième. Not until 1789 would there be such an onslaught on privilege. Louis’s innovations were blocked by vested interests at almost every level. None the less, he deserves full credit for his imagination. He saw the Canadians as more than mere producers of fur—there was a glut of beaver pelts—and encouraged new settlements, notably Louisiana in 1699; he had a vision of a New France which would stretch up the valley of the St Lawrence and down the Mississippi, from Hudson Bay to the Gulf of Mexico; he even created American titles of nobility. Further afield, he set up a new company to trade with China, in 1698, very much in Colbert’s manner.
Louis was equally realistic in his foreign policy. He knew that war was inevitable over the Spanish Succession. France had to fight. It was a unique opportunity of ending the Habsburg encirclement. In addition, as he pointed out after the conflict had begun, ‘The present war is a struggle for the commerce of the Spanish Indies and the wealth which they produce.’ Crippled and half insane, so afflicted that his subjects called him ‘The Bewitched’, the childless Charles II of Spain was near death for several years. Who would inherit his vast domains—his Austrian cousins or the Bourbons? In 1700, after earlier negotiations, France unwillingly agreed to a treaty which would give Spain and Milan to the Archduke Charles (the Emperor’s younger son) and Naples, Sicily, Tuscany and Guipuzcoa to the Dauphin. Then Louis was unexpectedly helped by Charles II who, angry that his Empire’s fate had been decided without consulting him, suddenly made a will leaving everything to the Dauphin’s second son, Philippe, Duc d’Anjou. Four weeks later Charles died. Louis hesitated before accepting the inheritance for his grandson. He told some great ladies, ‘Whichever side I take I am well aware that I shall be blamed for it.’ On 6 November he presented the Duc d’Anjou to the court, saying, ‘Messieurs, the King of Spain!’ As Saint-Simon comments, ‘The eighteenth century opened for the House of France with a blaze of glory.’
When poor old James II died at Saint-Germain in September 1701, Louis recognized the Prince of Wales as King James III of England, Scotland and Ireland. It seemed an act of remarkable generosity, in the face of apocalyptic warnings from his ministers; in fact Louis knew that William III had already decided on war—the Grand Alliance against France by the Empire, the Dutch and the English had been signed at The Hague a week previously. France’s one ally was Bavaria. Spain was merely a corpse to be fought over. The enemy had two commanders of genius, Prince Eugène of Savoy and John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough. The first had a fanatical hatred of Louis (who had once refused him a commission in the French army). Churchill, although a greedy and ambitious time-server, was in war a master of organization and surprise. To oppose them the King had Catinat, Boufflers, Tallard, Vendôme and Villars. The last two were quite as colourful, if not so gifted, as Eugène and Churchill. The Duc de Vendôme was the grandson of Henri IV, whom he much resembled, being wildly brave, a great trencherman and adored by his men. Unfortunately he never rose before four in the afternoon—but once out of bed, he could be an extremely formidable commander. Despite his notorious homosexuality, his slovenliness, his drinking and his syphilis—which cost him his nose—he was a favourite with the King. (Once when Vendôme was leaving court for a cure, the King asked him to return ‘in a state in which one might kiss him with safety’. When the Duke came back without his nose, Louis told the court to pretend not to notice.) The Duc de Villars was described by Saint-Simon as ‘the most fortunate man in the world’; a plump, amiable, unpolished Gascon, he owed his career to Louis, who had noticed his bravery during one of the Dutch campaigns. Although undoubtedly the best general that Louis now possessed, Villars had his own faults—boastful optimism and an odd manner, half blunt, half theatrical.
An unattractive side of Louis was his treatment of any promising Prince of the Blood. He refused military employment to Condé’s young nephew, the Prince de Conti, who was a gifted soldier, and ruined his career.
Monsieur’s brilliant son, the Duc de Chartres, was put off with equal shabbiness. ‘Treading the galleries of Versailles,’ as Saint-Simon described it, was not good for a young man with such a father and whose tutor had been the unsavoury Abbé Dubois. Philippe de Chartres had many gifts—he painted, sang, composed music (his opera Panthée was performed before the King) and was sufficiently interested in science and mechanics to have his own laboratory. He was above the other Princes of the Blood by his rank as a ‘Grandson of France’—being a grandson of Louis XIII. He had married a daughter of Mme de Montespan, Mlle de Blois, Monsieur’s agreement to such a mésalliance having been bought by the bestowal of the Cordon Bleu of the Saint-Esprit on his beloved Chevalier de Lorraine. (Saint-Simon says that M de Chartres’s mother, Madame, looked ‘like Ceres after the rape of her daughter Proserpine’, so horrified was she by the disgrace.) M de Chartres took solace in the bottle and in women; he was reputed to have naked harlots served up on silver dishes at his dinner parties. A notorious free thinker, he held orgies on Good Friday, read Rabelais bound like a missal during Mass, and tried to raise the Devil. Though these vices were not yet in full bloom in 1700, his life was already scandalous enough.
Since childhood, Monsieur had been accustomed to defer to the King. However, Louis’s steady refusal to give a command to his son angered him beyond endurance. In June 1701 when Louis complained of M de Chartres’s debauched life, Monsieur, flushed, his eyes red with rage, reminded the King of his own mistresses—soon both brothers were shouting at each other at the top of their voices. Monsieur, gluttonous, purple-faced and short of breath, had already been warned of apoplexy by a plain-spoken confessor. That night he had a fit during dinner, and he died the following day. Louis wept a good deal. Despite his absurdity, everyone had liked Monsieur; Saint-Simon admits, ‘It was he who set all pleasure a-going and when he left us, life and merriment seemed to have departed.’ A certain sense of guilt was evident in the King’s sudden generosity to M de Chartres, who was given all his father’s pensions and honours together with the Duchy of Orleans.
The war opened at the end of 1701, on three fronts. At first things did not go badly for the French. For two years Vendôme waged a surprisingly successful campaign against Eugène and the Imperial armies. In Germany, Villars won a glorious victory in the Black Forest near Friedlingen, and was rewarded with a Marshal’s baton. Next year he won more victories, while Tallard defeated the Imperialists near Spiers. Unfortunately the Bavarians refused to join in an advance on Vienna and Villars resigned in disgust. France had lost her one chance of winning the war.
At home the Huguenot mountaineers of the Cévennes rose in revolt. They were known as Camisards, from the white shirts they wore over their clothes to distinguish each other in the dark. The government used the most savage measures, perpetrating a kind of French Massacre of Glencoe when they burnt out mountain villages in mid-winter. Villars brought the rising to an end in 1704 by the imaginative expedient of offering its leader, Jean Cavalier, a colonelcy and persuading him to form his followers into a regiment which would fight for France. Cavalier also insisted on being taken to Versailles to see the King, but the young peasant was so humiliated when Louis passed him without saying a word that he took service with the English. It is said that nearly 100,000 men, women and children died during this rising, either Camisards or victims of their reprisals.
Abroad, a series of disasters began in 1704. At Blenheim, Marlborough killed 12,000 Frenchmen and captured even more, including the shortsighted Marshal Tallard, together with their entire artillery. The French were driven out of Germany, Bavaria was invaded and the Elector fled. In Spain, the English took Gibraltar while the Archduke Charles captured Barcelona—soon poor Philip V thought of taking refuge in America. In 1706 the elegant Villeroy, who was the son of Louis’s old tutor, was routed by Marlborough at Ramillies (near Waterloo); when he returned to Versailles, the King greeted him with the words, ‘M le Maréchal, at our age one can no longer expect to be lucky.’ The defeat cost France the Low Countries. Vendôme was recalled to hold off Marlborough, whereupon Prince Eugène drove the French out of Italy, killing the French commander in the process; next year Eugène invaded Provence, besieging Toulon, though he was driven out with heavy casualties. In 1708 even Vendôme was defeated, at Oudenarde by Marlborough, and the French army was almost destroyed in the ensuing retreat. Luckily the allies baulked at a full-scale invasion, though a small Dutch force actually penetrated as far as Versailles and captured one of the King’s equerries.
It was the nadir of Louis’s fortunes. The winter of 1708–9 was a terrible one. The cold was such that at Versailles wine froze in the glasses and ink on the pens. An iron-hard frost lasted until the end of March; animals froze to death in their barns, game birds in the trees, rabbits in their burrows; the spring wheat and barley perished, whole vineyards died and in the south the entire olive crop was destroyed. Famine set in everywhere. Even at Versailles, royal servants were seen begging at the gates and Mme de Maintenon ate oatmeal bread ostentatiously; in Burgundy bracken was used to make flour, and throughout the countryside the peasants were reduced to nettles and boiled grass. Louis did what he could, imposing a special tax to feed the hungry, from which not even he himself was exempted; he forbade the baking of white bread, abolished transport dues and tariffs; he had his gold plate melted down, eating off silver gilt instead. All this did little to abate the famine. Even the troops starved, selling their muskets to buy bread.
France, bankrupt, starving, her industries and trade in ruins, her armies beaten and demoralized, and faced by triumphant and revengeful enemies, was now in a position very like that of Germany at the beginning of 1945. At a council meeting, the Duc de Beauvilliers drew such a miserable picture of France’s condition that the Duc de Bourgogne burst into tears, followed by the entire council. This ruinous situation is often depicted by historians as the just reward of Louis’s folly. Whatever the cause, it showed him at his greatest. He was not a Hitler who would sacrifice his country; humbling himself, he sued abjectly for peace, sending the Marquis de Torcy to obtain it on any terms. But the allies insisted that Louis must himself drive his grandson, Philip V, out of Spain. The King would accept anything but this. ‘If I have to make war,’ he said, ‘I prefer to fight my enemies rather than my children.’
It was Louis’s finest moment. He sent a circular letter to every provincial governor, to every bishop and to every municipality, explaining why France had to fight on; he admitted that all sources of revenue were virtually exhausted, and asked for advice and for help. Recruits flocked to the colours, while the rich handed in their plate and valuables; in 1710 the French even accepted the dixième, a ten per cent tax on all incomes. The tide began to turn. Marlborough defeated Villars at Malplaquet in late 1709, but only just; the French losing 8,000 men compared to the allies’ 21,000. Next year Vendôme, ‘happiest and haughtiest of men’, utterly destroyed the Austrian army of Spain, hitherto victorious, at Villaviciosa. The allies were astonished by the French will to resist. In England the Tories gained power and removed Marlborough from his command. But the situation still seemed desperate for France.
Meanwhile in April 1711, the first of a series of terrible personal blows struck Louis. The Dauphin, ‘drowned in fat and sloth’ though he was, had always seemed healthy enough. Suddenly he fell ill and died of smallpox, within little more than a week. The Duc de Bourgogne was now Dauphin, and impressed everyone by his sense of responsibility, attending all Council meetings and listening carefully to what ministers and generals had to say. Even Marie Adelaide became more serious. Then early in February 1712, when she was pregnant, she developed a fever; a rash appeared and she was dead within a few days. Louis wrote to Philip of Spain, ‘There will never be a moment in my life when I shall not regret her.’ Less than a week after his wife’s death, the Duc de Bourgogne developed the mysterious rash. ‘He was extraordinarily fond of his wife, and sorrow for her death gave him his fever.’ He died three days later, perhaps the worst blow of all to Louis.
His mind formed by Fénelon, Bourgogne, had he lived, might have saved the Ancien Régime. He recognized and lamented the gulf between monarch and subject. He intended to introduce changes in taxation—which would have ended the privileged position of the nobility—and generally to broaden the entire basis of government. Few men have been mourned so deeply.
Early in March the Bourgognes’ two surviving children sickened, and the elder, the five-year-old Duc de Bretagne, soon died. The younger, the Duc d’Anjou, was saved by his governess, the Duchesse de Ventadour, who said that he was too small to be bled, and had him breast-fed in her own room until the rash went. So mysterious were these deaths—probably a rare form of measles—that it was rumoured that the Duc de Bourgogne and his family had been poisoned by the Duc d’Orléans whose interest in chemistry was well known; the Duke was hissed in the streets. The Duc du Maine seems to have been largely responsible for spreading the slander. But the King had too much sense to believe such rumours. He showed incredible fortitude; Saint-Simon said that he truly merited the title of ‘the Great’ by his behaviour.
It was at this time that France was in most danger. Prince Eugène prepared to invade France from Flanders with 130,000 men. In April Louis entrusted Villars with his last army. In tears, his voice shaking, he told Villars, ‘You see the condition I am in, M le Maréchal. Few people have known, as I have, what it is to lose a grandson, a grand-daughter and their son, all of great promise and deeply loved, within a few weeks. God is punishing me and I deserve it: I shall suffer less in the world to come.’ The King went on to discuss what he should do if Villars failed. ‘Most of my courtiers want me to go to Blois without waiting for the enemy to advance on Paris, as they may well do if our army is defeated.’ But Louis thought that even if the worst happened, sufficient French troops would hold out on the north bank of the Somme. ‘I shall go to Péronne or Saint-Quentin, collect all the troops I can muster and make a last stand with you, in which we will either die together or save the kingdom.’
But in July Villars captured the fortified town of Denain and cut the allied army in half. Eugène was forced to retreat, the French advancing steadily and capturing town after town. Within less than two months, Prince Eugène had lost over fifty battalions; fifty-three enemy standards were sent to Versailles. At the Treaty of Utrecht in April 1713, Philip V renounced his claim to the French throne and was recognized as King of Spain by most of the allies. France kept Alsace and Strasbourg. In return Louis ceded Hudson Bay and Gibraltar to England and agreed to disown poor James III.
Although he had brought his kingdom close to ruin, he had won a brilliant triumph, demonstrating the strength of the state which he had created: France would not be invaded again till the Revolution. With his usual realism, Louis now began negotiations for an alliance with Vienna. The Habsburg encirclement had been broken for ever. Sainte-Beuve says patronizingly, ‘Louis had nothing more than good sense, but he had plenty of it.’ One may think that the old King had more than good sense—he anticipated a realignment in European diplomacy by thirty years.
In May 1714 Louis suffered yet another tragedy, when his third and last grandson, the Duc de Berry, died after a fall from his horse. Berry’s children had all died in infancy so (apart from Philip of Spain, who was not eligible) the King’s only heir was his great-grandson, the frail, four-year-old Duc d’Anjou. The heir presumptive was Monsieur’s son, the disreputable Philippe d’Orléans. In August 1714 Louis went directly against the loi fondamental by forcing the Parlement to recognize the Duc du Maine and the Comte de Toulouse as Princes of the Blood, with the right of succession to the throne in the event of M d’Anjou’s death. The education of the latter was to be entrusted to the Duc du Maine, who in these last days was the old King’s favourite companion.
Louis was now nearer eighty than seventy. Yet his appetite for food continued to astonish observers—some believed that he had a gigantic tapeworm. It was still the appetite of which his sister-in-law had written, ‘I have often seen the King drink four bowls of different sorts of soup and then eat an entire pheasant, a partridge, a large plate of salad, mutton with gravy or garlic, a dish of patisserie and after that fruit and hard-boiled eggs.’ Large quantities of bread and cold meat with two bottles of wine were placed in his room every night in case he should feel hungry. Plenty of fruit and green vegetables seem to have saved him from any ill consequences. At this period he drank watered burgundy instead of champagne, usually Romanée St Vivant, which had originally been prescribed for him after his fistula operation by the surgeon, Fagon, who told him, ‘Tonic and generous, it suits, Sire, a robust temperament such as yours.’ He needed exercise as much as ever, walking in all weathers, and following the hunt in his little cart. He worked his customary hours. He still exhausted Mme de Maintenon with his demands and then ‘slept like a child’. He kept his liking for Molière’s comedies—especially Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Georges Dandin and Le Coccu Imaginaire—which were often performed at Versailles. In June 1715 he remarked, ‘If I continue to eat with such a good appetite, I am going to ruin all those Englishmen who have wagered large sums that I will die by September.’ But the English would win their bet.
Perhaps sensing that his end was not far off, he had grown steadily more devout in recent years. He listened dutifully to his new confessor, the sinister and fanatical Jesuit, Le Tellier. An old peasant who looked like a bird of prey, arrogant and illiterate and with burning eyes, Le Tellier has even been compared to Rasputin, such was his influence over Louis. The King was sincerely pious but he had a curiously underdeveloped religious sense. On his deathbed he told Cardinal Rohan that in matters of religion he had only done what his bishops had advised him. ‘It is you who will have to answer to God for everything that has been done … I have a clear conscience.’
The King enjoyed himself at Marly in the first few days of August 1715 and had a good stag hunt. Suddenly, on 10 August, he felt ill and returned to Versailles. Two days later sores broke out on his left leg. Although in pain, he worked as usual with his ministers, and interviewing ambassadors, and tried to soothe himself with frequent concerts. His leg began to smell foully and then turned black—it was gangrene. By 24 August, he knew he was dying. Next day he added a codicil to his will, nominating Philippe d’Orléans as chief of the Council of Regency.
He was already talking of ‘the time when I was King’. He took a dignified farewell of his courtiers, thanking them for their service and asking their pardon for the bad example he had set them. At the end both he and they began to cry. ‘I perceive that I am allowing my feelings to overcome me,’ said Louis, ‘and am making you do likewise. I beg your forgiveness for it. Farewell, gentlemen—I hope you will sometimes remember me.’ Later, however, he rebuked two servants for weeping: ‘Why do you shed tears? Did you think me immortal?’
He summoned his five-year-old great-grandson, who was placed on his bed. He told him, ‘My child, you are about to become the greatest King in the world. Never forget your duty to God. Do not copy me in my taste for war. And try to relieve your people as much as you can, which I unhappily have not done because of the needs of the state …’ He then kissed the Dauphin, blessed him and burst into tears.
It was a long and agonizing death, which he suffered with dignity. He received the sacraments many times and prayed fervently. He told his wife, ‘I thought it would be harder to die—I assure you it is not very terrible and does not seem difficult to me.’ His last words were, ‘Oh my God, come to my aid, make haste to succour me!’ He died at a quarter to eight on the morning of Sunday 1 September 1715.
The whole country rejoiced. His coffin was hooted at on the way to Saint-Denis by a drunken mob, and Voltaire saw small booths set up along the route where people drank and sang. Saint-Simon says that the provinces leapt for joy. Both the nobles and the lawyers felt that their deliverance had come. But the diarist also noted that no foreign court rejoiced—‘all plumed themselves on praising and honouring his memory’.
Historians vary considerably in their judgement of Louis and, indeed, the motives for many of his actions remain as much a mystery now as they were to his contemporaries. On the whole, however, he is generally seen as a selfish megalomaniac, whose lust for glory ruined his people; whose demoralization of the French nobility made the Revolution inevitable; whose ruthlessness in personal relationships ruined the lives of his intimates. This picture owes a good deal to the almost hypnotic fascination of Saint-Simon’s memoirs, and much to the impression made by the soulless bulk of Versailles. Yet Saint-Simon was biased to the point of derangement, while without its glittering courtiers, Versailles, essentially theatrical in conception, could never be more than a vast and deserted playhouse. The métier of absolute monarch was a demanding one which few human beings could perform without losing some of their humanity. None the less, Louis was a good father, a good son, a good brother and, for most of his married life, a good husband. If he made France suffer, he made her great. Napoleon, whose judgements it is always dangerous to ignore, once said, ‘Louis XIV was a great King. He made France first among the nations. What French King since Charlemagne can be compared with him?’