EIGHT
My dominant pattern is certainly love of glory.
—Louis XIV
His name cannot be uttered without respect, without linking it to an eternally memorable century.
—Voltaire on Louis XIV
LOUIS XIV MADE HIS TRIUMPHAL ENTRY into Paris in 1652. The diarist John Evelyn, over from Commonwealth England to watch it, remarked, with possibly a touch of envy: “The French are the only nation in Europe to idolise their sovereign.” Louis had won a notable victory, and would waste no time capitalising upon it. As Voltaire put it, the King “found himself absolute master of a kingdom still shaken from the blows it had received, every branch of administration in disorder, but full of resources.” 1
The country he inherited had seldom been in worse straits. Fields were covered in weeds and brambles, livestock slaughtered by marauding bands. Food had to be imported to the countryside from the royal granaries. Paris was in a shambles, with murder and theft rampant. The royal coffers were empty, and the national debt (in 1661) amounted to double the King’s revenues. Yet the country, blessed with its wealth based as ever on Sully’s deux mamelles, its prodigious combination of climate and incredibly fertile land, remained innately rich. As another visiting London author, Heylyn, observed of the Île de France, it was
A Country generally so fruitfull and delectable (except in Gastinois) that the very hills thereof are equally to the vallies in most places of Europe; but the Vale of Monmorencie (wherein Paris standeth) scarcely to be fellowed in the World . . .
On the first anniversary of July 1652, the now subservient Hôtel de Ville launched a grand festival celebrating the re-establishment of royal authority. But, henceforth, Louis watched it like a hawk. In June 1654, he was crowned at Rheims. While out hunting in April 1655, he had word that Parlement was meeting without his knowledge. Riding 4 miles at a gallop, he entered the Palais de Justice in his riding boots to dissolve the meeting. Legend has it that, cracking his whip, he uttered the famous words: “L’État, c’est moi.” The next day he was granted the taxes he sought. For much of the rest of his reign, however, Louis would be assiduous in avoiding both Parlement and the Hôtel de Ville—which he would always remember as the focus of the Paris Fronde.
FOUR YEARS LATER, in 1659, Louis signed the Treaty of the Pyrenees, bringing an end to the wars with Spain—France’s principal enemy ever since the days of François I and Charles V. He sealed it with a bond of marriage to his cousin, Infanta Maria-Theresa. For an extravagant dowry of half-a-million gold écus, his bride renounced her rights to the throne of Spain. Militarily Spain was no longer a problem. At the same time, France’s other hereditary enemy, England, had ceased to menace her; Cromwell was dead, and Charles II, indebted to France for her hospitality during his exile, was about to be restored as a monarch without real power—just as Louis took over in France as her absolute ruler. The future held out the promise of exceptional stability and prosperity for France.
FOLLOWING HIS MARRIAGE on the frontier at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, Louis returned to Paris amid fanfares in August 1660. There had been something like a dummy-run for this two Septembers previously when the renowned ex-Queen of Sweden, Christina, converted to Catholicism by Descartes, had stunned Paris by riding on horseback into the city, clad in a scarlet jerkin. The royal guard, 300 archers and 15,000 citizens in arms had turned out to welcome this mannish daughter of France’s northern ally, Gustavus Adolphus. After surprising Queen Anne by her demand for a stiff drink at the Louvre, Christina hastened off to the Place Royale (des Vosges) to meet the famed courtesan Ninon de Lenclos; lodged at Fontainebleau during her two-year stay, she executed—almost with her own hands—an unreliable Italian favourite, much to the dismay of Louis, who, regretting his hospitality, would regularly take flight from her loud voice.
But, as pure spectacle Parisians had never seen anything quite like Louis’ own entry; nor would ensuing centuries bring them anything to compare with the successive spectacles he laid on in evocation of Ancient Rome. At the end of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, near where the frondeurs had fought their last battle, a huge throne was set up on a site henceforth known as the Place du Trône. Here Louis received all the official bodies of Paris, filing past to pay homage. Then an immense procession escorted the young couple to the Louvre. From glittering balconies they could see looking down on them Queen Mother Anne and the ageing Mazarin, the victorious Marshal Turenne—and a Mme. Scarron, who, as Marquise de Maintenon, would eventually become Louis’ last wife. An estimated 100,000 Parisians saw their King that day in all his reassuring splendour; they would never be so close to him again, or to any other French monarch.
Two years later, to celebrate the birth of his first-born, Louis would mount another great spectacle, in which sumptuously attired horsemen vied against each other in a cross between a medieval tournament and a ballet. Louis XIV offered his unruly people circuses instead of revolt and riots—all designed to further the magnificence of his personal gloire. It worked. Here lay the beginnings of the myth of the Age of the Sun King. In the words of Vincent Cronin, “handsome, gifted, popular, self assured, hard working, majestic in all he did,” he stood in sharp contrast to his rivals, Charles II of England, Leopold of Austria and Philip IV of Spain.
IN MARCH 1661, Mazarin died at Vincennes, aged only fifty-nine, but prematurely exhausted. A grief-stricken Louis burst into tears; “he loved me and I loved him,” he later admitted about this discreet and sagacious “stepfather”—an admission he would make of no other human being. For two hours he shut himself up alone; then he called in his first Council. But possibly he was also relieved. As he wrote in his memoirs, “I felt my mind and courage soar . . . I felt quite another man. I discovered in myself qualities I had never suspected.” Later he was heard to remark: “La face du théâtre change” and, as he made explicitly plain to his entourage, “in future I shall be my own Prime Minister.” Five years later his mother, Anne, also died. Louis was now alone, and the sole ruler of France. With a population of 18 million, compared with England’s 5½, Spain’s 6, Austria’s 6½ and Russia’s 14 million, it was substantially the largest country in Europe.
WOE BETIDE ANY LESSER MORTAL who might seem to try to upstage Louis, or even compete with him. Nicolas Fouquet was a vain upwardly mobile parvenu whose father had helped colonise the West Indies. Aged forty-five, he had just built himself a magnificent mansion at Vaux-le-Vicomte, some 30 miles south of Paris. His crest, still visible on that great unfinished pile, was a squirrel with the challenging motto Quo non ascendet (“How far will he not climb”). Since 1653, Fouquet also happened to be Louis’ Minister Superintendent of Finances. There was some talk even that he would eventually succeed Mazarin as prime minister. He had many friends in high places; it was reckoned that some 116 people owed their wealth, or position, to him. He had spent lavishly— and not unwisely—on the arts; in fact, between 1655 and 1660 Fouquet had virtually replaced the King as the nation’s leading patron, employing a galaxy of the greatest and the best of French artists and writers.
On the day after the Cardinal’s death, however, Louis had appointed Mazarin’s astute and incorruptible secretary, called Jean-Baptiste Colbert, as Fouquet’s assistant. Five months later, on 17 August 1661, Fouquet audaciously invited the King to a sumptuous gala at Vaux-le-Vicomte. The massive iron gates gleamed golden with freshly applied gilt; in the vast gardens 200 jets d’eau and 50 fountains lined a half-mile-long main allée. Nothing like it had been seen before, even in the great gardens of Italy, Tivoli and Frascati. Certainly it trumped the modest royal hunting-lodge out at Versailles, which Louis was currently doing up. Was it hardly surprising that a monarch so addicted to spectacle should be given ideas?
The royal party dined off a magnificent gold service; by contrast, the King had had to sell off his plate to meet military expenditure. Following this feast, in an outdoor theatre lit with torches, the current toast of the Paris theatre, a Monsieur Molière, introduced a new play written for the occasion. The whole episode outraged Louis. How could his own Superintendent of Finances legitimately afford such conspicuous expense, well in excess of anything the King could mount at any of his palaces? The Queen Mother, Anne, had to restrain him from arresting Fouquet on the spot, prudently cautioning Louis: “No, not in his house, not at an entertainment he is giving for you.”
Less than three weeks later, however, as he was arriving at a meeting of the Council in Nantes, Fouquet was arrested by the legendary d’Artagnan of Three Musketeers fame. He was heard to murmur, with supreme hubris: “I thought I stood higher with the King than anyone in France.”
Fouquet’s fall from the dizzy height to which the over-ambitious squirrel had risen was terrible to behold. Louis, abetted by a Colbert only too happy to spy on his boss, had in fact been planning to move on Fouquet already for several months prior to the extravaganza at Vaux. The trial—before twenty-two judges—dragged on for the best part of three years. With France’s economy in a terrible mess, savage inflation and rumours of deeply entrenched corruption abounding, the spectacle of the mighty and arrogant Superintendent of Finances on trial for his life was highly popular to the mob. But most of the charges against Fouquet were disgracefully trumped up at the King’s instigation, and a fair trial was hardly possible. Charges that Fouquet had “taken to confusing the credit of the state with his own” could equally have been levied against the mighty Mazarin. It was noted how the King’s personal debt just about equalled the sums which Fouquet was accused of having salted away to his personal account. In subsequent ages, pungent comparisons were made between the trial of Fouquet and the Dreyfus case; certainly it did neither the regime, Colbert nor Louis, much honour. One of the judges, Olivier d’Ormesson, was sympathetic to the defendant and was ruined by the King as a result; the articulate and influential Mme. de Sévigné expressed open admiration for Fouquet, for his calmness during the protracted trial.
Had it not been for such support, the death sentence would almost certainly have been pronounced. As it was, his doctor and personal valet broke down and wept aloud in court, and insisted on following him into prison. As he was led away, Fouquet addressed the King (as recorded by Mme. de Sévigné 2): “Sire, you know full well that one can be overtaken by events!” These were words that might well have been inscribed on the epitaphs of many a modern-day minister of finance. Though Fouquet’s fate was not quite so severe as that which had overtaken Philippe le Bel’s Superintendent of Finances, de Marigny, for seventeen years he suffered appalling privations in prison, then exile at Pignerol. Stories proliferated that Fouquet was the famous unknown prisoner in the black velvet mask. Never completed, his dream at Vaux was to pass through many hands until the present day, where a certain flash vulgarity in the great mansion, with its busily ascending squirrels, still shines through.
The fall of Fouquet had important consequences. Louis’ ruthlessness towards Fouquet was motivated by an obsessive fear of plots against his person—by no means irrational, given the only recently ended Frondes. But, shamelessly, like a re-enactment of the story of Naboth’s Vineyard, Louis also grabbed the fallen man’s architect, Le Vau, his garden-designer, Le Nôtre, his muralist, Le Brun, and his skilled artisans to set them to work for the greater glory of Versailles. Moreover, as was made definitively clear after the trial, Louis would now rule supreme without any checks or hindrances. Colbert, the bourgeois son of a modest draper from Rheims, would take over Fouquet’s coveted position, having so assiduously engineered his fall. Brilliant administrator though he turned out to be, Colbert would always be Louis’ man. Under the “Roi Soleil,” government according to the three qualities of order, regularity and unity would, for better and for worse, characterise what Louis was to achieve for his people.
THE TRIAL OF NICOLAS FOUQUET was barely over than gossip in Paris shifted to focus upon the King’s mistresses. His virginity having been removed obligingly by his mother’s faithful servant, Catherine Bellier,40 Louis had swiftly become sexually disenchanted with his plain Spanish bride, once she had produced him an heir, and—in the way of French monarchs—had energetically set to acquiring beautiful young women from the court. First there came Louise de la Vallière, with whom Louis fell passionately in love almost simultaneously with the beginnings of his obsession with Versailles. Then there arrived the extraordinary, tall blonde beauty, Marie-Angélique de Fontanges (described by the arch-gossip, Mme. de Sévigné, as being “belle comme une ange, sotte comme un panier”).
Poor Louise was forced to take flight to a convent. She was succeeded by the infinitely wilier, sexually adept and more conniving Athénaïs de Montespan. In 1677, the perceptive Mme. de Sévigné saw this mistress “covered with diamonds, the other day, such a brilliant divinity that one’s eyes dazzled. The attachment [to the King] seems stronger than it has ever been; they’re at the stage when people can’t stop looking at each other.” Between them the mistresses bore Louis a regiment of illegitimates (Montespan alone provided eight, while most of the Queen’s died). The most intense jealousies and rivalries would culminate in the A faire des Poisons.
IN THE 1670s, a series of mysterious deaths hit Paris with a hysteria about rumours of poisoning. Allegedly, sorceresses and midwives had been practising abortion, and easily procured poison for whomever they wished. Contemporaries had come to attribute all sudden deaths to poison, including those of such eminent figures as “Madame,” Princess Henrietta of England, the sad youngest daughter of Charles I. She was the first wife of the King’s homosexual brother, Philippe d’Orléans, “Monsieur,” who died suddenly in 1670 (now thought to have been a natural death from acute peritonitis, though a glass of chicory water was blamed at the time). There were the deaths of Mlle. de Fontanges, mistress to the King, and rival to Athénaïs de Montespan—and even of both Colbert and his successor, Louvois, and many others. The greatest public inquest of the reign now took place.
Poisoning, fashionable ever since the Medicis first introduced the art to France, was once more blamed on them as new and undetectable substances were imported from Italy. Dark rumours began to circulate in Paris of how the “Black Mass” was being celebrated at night, in caves or isolated places in the suburbs, by lapsed priests, often in cooperation with fortune-tellers. Rumours turned into fact with the trial before the Paris law courts in 1676 of a noblewoman, Marie-Madeleine d’Aubray, la Marquise de Brinvilliers. The high society trial made the city buzz with speculation. It transpired that the Marquise had poisoned both her own father and two brothers, and attempted to kill her husband, in order to marry her lover, Captain Sainte-Croix. But the lover, “who did not want a wife as malicious as himself,” administered an antidote to the Marquis—or so claimed the ubiquitous and omniscient Mme. de Sévigné.
It was only with the death of Sainte-Croix, in 1672, that the police investigation began, when incriminating papers and vials of poison were found. The civil lieutenant at the Châtelet tested the arsenic solutions on animals, which promptly died. The Marquise’s accomplice, her valet, was broken on the wheel. Upon her arrest Mme. de Brinvilliers made a complete confession to her judges; nevertheless she was put to la question ordinaire et extraordinaire à l’eau. This was a most unpleasant form of torture—not dissimilar to that practised by the modern-day French Army during the Algerian War some three centuries later—which involved filling the stomach full to bursting with water, but which left no external marks.
On 17 July 1676, facing her public execution with considerable courage, the little Marquise declared her contrition once again to a priest and received absolution. The executioner cut off her head with a single blow of the axe—the merciful treatment accorded a noblewoman. Her body was then burned.
Swiftly, public attentions moved on to other matters, such as Louis’ war in the Netherlands, rumbling away distantly in the siege of Maastricht. But the A faire des Poisons was far from over, with the trial and death of “la Brinvilliers” no more than a prologue to sentences passed over the next four years from 1679 onwards.
THE REVELATORY BRINVILLIERS CASE set in motion a chain of investigations led by the industrious Chief of Police in Paris, Nicolas de La Reynie, who established a chambre ardente especially to deal with poisoning charges. On 13 March 1679, a Mme. de la Voisin was arrested, disclosing that she had been approached by the Duchesse de Bouillon “for a little poison to kill off an old husband who is killing her with boredom”3 (a fairly commonplace Parisian complaint!). Here there opened a whole new and even more dangerous ball-game—the supply of love philtres, Cantharides or “Spanish fly” (the Viagra of the age). It was noted that Athénaïs de Montespan, Louis’ reigning favourite, had “precipitately left the court.” Between 7 April 1679 and 8 April 1682, 319 people were arrested. Evidence was produced, under torture, of black masses performed by unsavoury priests. During one such black mass, incantations had been made for the death of the King, where a white wax figurine was burned.
A long procession of women of lesser rank than the Marquise de Brinvilliers went to the stake to be burned alive as witches. The list included a priest named Tournet, accused of sorcery and sacrilege, burned alive in 1677; Mme. Bosse, burned alive in 1679, less than a month into the investigation; her son François Bosse, strangled and hanged. Moreau, a shepherd, was broken on the wheel. An écuyer of the Marquis de Termes was accused of having delivered six poisoned bottles to Mlle. de Fontanges, but she was already confined in the Abbey of Chelles; he had the good grace to die under torture, thus avoiding the need to bring the charges to light. Accusations ran wild; even prepared was an order for the arrest of Jean Racine, the famous playwright, after Voisin had claimed that thecomedienne, Mlle. du Parc, had died of poisoning and blamed Racine.
There were rumours that the King wanted to clean up morals, with a specific attack on sodomy; but this would have brought him into difficulties with his brother, “Monsieur.” Equally, there were constant whisperings of a plot to poison the King. Finally, there arrived the day of execution of “la Voisin” herself, burned alive on 22 February 1680, at the Place de Grève. Among a vast range of confessions, she had admitted to having incinerated more than 2500 aborted children. “So much for the death of Mme. Voisin, notorious for her crimes and her impiety,” commented Sévigné, hinting, ominously: “People believe that there will be greater episodes to follow which will take us by surprise...” 4
La Reynie’s investigation crept closer and closer to the King’s inner circle. Most dangerous of all was the increasing mention of the name of Athénaïs de Montespan. Now thirty-eight, Montespan had come to feel she was losing way in the King’s affections. To hold him, she had—so it appeared—liberally fed him with aphrodisiacs. The result had been to give the King terrible headaches which gravely worried his doctors. Following interrogation of Montespan’s sister-in-law, Mme. de Vivonne, four clear charges now stood against Montespan, including the attempted murder of the King. But how could Louis allow a lover to whom he had been publicly attached for thirteen years, and who had been the mother of many of his children, to be subjected to the methods of the chambre ardente?
With stunning abruptness, further prosecutions were suspended and the work of the chambre ardente terminated. The doggedly persistent La Reynie was now compelled to make, for his own safety, a lame admission that he had been “unable to get to the bottom of the a faire,” and “I must hold my judgement in suspension.” The last of the “poisoners” died in 1717, surviving the King and thirty-seven years of grim incarceration. The lesser canailles were spirited off to exile in Canada. Louis had the trial proceedings burned; yet, the scandal would not die. When Louvois, Colbert’s dour successor, died in July 1691, his son claimed that he too had been poisoned.
Although the King’s intervention had saved her from the possible horrors of “examination,” the reign of the powerful, Machiavellian Athénaïs de Montespan was over. For appearances’ sake—and to the “Sun King” appearances were all important—she was allowed to linger on under the eyes of the court for another ten years; then she was bundled off to Saint-Joseph, the convent she had founded, for sixteen more years expiating her sins. Worse, the prim and devout ex-governess to her own children, Françoise Scarron, otherwise known as Mme. de Maintenon, now moved in—and for the rest of the King’s reign. Her takeover from Montespan occurred at almost the same time as Louis removed the court to Versailles. Given the degree of embarrassment that an abandoned Mme. de Montespan might have caused the King in Paris, and given the suspicions bandied about in the capital, could it be that Louis XIV’s escape to Versailles had an added immediacy directly linked to the scandal? He had every good reason to wash his hands of the whole affair, and move his entourage out to purer air.
THE FRONDES, the trial of Fouquet and the various a faires des poisons had all been significant milestones on the route to Versailles of Louis XIV. But what had his considerable civil accomplishments contributed, during the first half of the reign, which ended with his decampment for Versailles in 1682?
During ten years of personal rule, Louis XIV had launched a virtually bankrupt country upon a course of remarkable prosperity. It was predicated on three factors: the avoidance of major conflict; the brilliant policies of the man who succeeded the disgraced Fouquet, Jean-Baptiste Colbert; and the extraordinary inherited and inherent wealth of the country at large. Colbert was already forty-one when appointed assistant to Fouquet in 1661. He was a teetotaller, icily cold and humourless, earning the nickname of the “Man of Marble,” or “le Nord.” The venerable Mazarin, in whose employ Colbert’s career had started, was alleged to have said to the King shortly before his death: “Sire, I owe you everything, but I believe I can repay some of my debt by giving you Colbert.” It was a debt more than repaid.
A worthy successor to Sully, and in contrast to Fouquet, Colbert was immaculately honest. Uniquely among Louis’ sycophantic entourage, he was able to confront the King over his extravagances and the use, or abuse, of royal power. After Mazarin and the demise of Fouquet, Louis would permit no one near him with the prerogatives of a prime minister; yet Colbert’s influence came to extend far beyond that of a Superintendent of Finances, not least in the centralisation of the nation upon the capital. And the success of his financial reforms is revealed by the balance sheets for 1661—when expenditure was £18 million, leaving a deficit of £8 million—and for 1667, by which time net receipts had doubled, resulting in a surplus of £9 million. A large share of state revenue still came via such archaic and corruptible practices as the sale of offices and the tax-farmers who continued to take their cut of the revenue they gleaned. Under Colbert’s regime, however, a kind of industrial revolution swept the country. Shipbuilding multiplied, the army was modernised and expanded; mines, foundries, mills and refineries thrived; so did the wool trade on the back of such prestige industries as Savonnerie carpets and France’s superlative Gobelin tapestries. Overseas investments like her colony in Canada expanded vigorously. Colbert’s regime put France seriously to work, emulating the serious side of its pleasure-loving King, who advised: “Never forget that it is by work that a King rules.”5
AS IN PREVIOUS ERAS, it was the immense fecundity of rural France that produced the wealth for Colbert’s treasury. Yet under the increasing burdens of his taxation, rural society remained relatively impoverished throughout much of the reign of the Roi Soleil; while Paris grew and expanded markedly to a city of 400,000, the rural population if anything declined. In the seventeenth century the French peasantry was often hit by shortages and recession; the weather was capricious, producing years of terrible harvests. In a bad year a village could easily lose between 10 and 20 per cent of its population, while agriculture had not matched the advancements being achieved in England. The price of land was such that the purchase of a holding large enough to support one family might cost a labourer the equivalent of a century’s wages.
Despite occasional periods of prosperity, for the majority of Frenchmen it was, notes Robin Briggs, “an epoch of hardship, often of despair and untimely death.” Moreover, the peasantry found itself exploited, parasitically, by the state, the Church, landlords and bureaucrats alike. There were sometimes popular revolts against taxation, and regular bread riots in provincial towns, yet because of the centralised power of the absolute monarchy they were never permitted to amount to anything—not for another hundred years. Paris and the provinces would continue to look at each other with mutual dislike, disdain and distrust, but what was remarkable was that the ancien régime forged by Louis XIV would face no coordinated uprising until the reign of his great-great-grandson, Louis XVI.
“LET NO ONE SPEAK TO ME of anything small!” Louis’ Italian architect, Bernini, had declared when redesigning the Louvre for him in 1665. It was a view with which the Roi Soleil was distinctly in accord. On 6 May 1682, slightly less than a century after his grandfather, Henri IV, had gained mastery of his capital, Louis announced that the seat of the French government would be out at his former hunting-lodge, Versailles. It was 20 kilometres removed from the Louvre, or less than half-a-day’s coach journey. Even so, “The Court of France forever in the country! The fashionable world was filled with dismay.” But not all the criticism was frivolous. For years Colbert had beseeched his master to abandon the Versailles project, for sound economic reasons.
The house was still far from ready, but the King thought he would never get the workmen out unless he moved in himself. Jules Hardouin-Mansart was still at work finishing the Galerie des Glaces:
Seen at night soon after its completion, the painting and the gilding fresh and new; lit by thousands of candles in silver chandeliers and candelabra, furnished with solid silver consoles and tubs of orange trees; crowded with beauties of both sexes, dressed in satin and lace, embroidered, re-embroidered, over-embroidered with real gold thread and covered with jewels, it must have been like Aladdin’s cave or some other fable of the Orient.
The rest of the accommodation, designed to provide lodgings for between 2000 and 5000 people, was austere, to say the least. According to Saint-Simon, the royal apartments were “the last word in inconvenience, with back views over the privies and other dark and evil-smelling places.” 6 But at least the King and his descendants could feel safe there; although they were virtually unguarded, over the coming century there would be only one half-hearted attempt at assassination.
AGED FORTY-FOUR IN 1682, Louis was at the peak of his powers. In 1661, his Queen, Maria-Theresa, had presented him with a son and heir, the Grand Dauphin (or Monseigneur), who showed promise of becoming a sound ruler and who in turn, later that same year of the move to Versailles, produced an heir, the Duc de Bourgogne. The succession of the throne of France, only recently so shaky, seemed assured. Louis’ own health was excellent (in fact, he would live for another three decades), the territory of France was secure from a Spain and a Holy Roman Empire in decline, while Restoration England’s pleasure-loving Charles II even drew his pay from France. France seemed to have little or nothing to fear in the world from her neighbours.
Thanks most of all to the incorruptible Colbert (though now all but worn out from his labours), the economy was as sound as it had ever been. France enjoyed nearly four times the revenue of her neighbour and rival, Stuart England, and ten times that of opulent Venice. In the arts, too, France had achieved a peak of excellence seldom surpassed—either before or after. Racine had just written Phèdre, the last of his dark tragedies, and had now accepted the role of Royal Historiographer—at Versailles. In Paris the magnificent Cour Carrée of the Louvre was virtually complete. More practically, order had been imposed, with crime in abeyance and hygiene immeasurably improved. With the Frondes crushed, the city was tranquil—and well lit, by the installation of 6500 lanterns. The theatre critic Chappuzeau could claim with just pride: “regardless of where one turns, Paris was never so fine nor so stately as it is today.”
The nation seemed, rarely and miraculously, at peace with herself. The King could now, with some justification, call himself “Louis le Grand” (the title which the municipality of Paris had unctuously bestowed on him in 1678) and the “Roi Soleil.” He could surely afford a little personal extravagance in building a new country seat; and, like many of his Valois forebears, François I for instance, Louis preferred country to town. Yet it was not so much la chasse that drew him as the space, but his love of order in all things, as well as the nature of Paris, discovered in his early years. He disliked and distrusted the city; he would return there only twenty-five times from 1670 to the end of his reign. There were good reasons for his dislike that were rooted in the past, and it was not just the malodorous stench that continued to reach out from the Seine to the Louvre.
AT THIS TURNING POINT in his life, Louis’ outward appearance could scarcely have been more regal. By the standards of the day he looked tall, though it was an impression partly enhanced by resort to high-heeled shoes and imposing wigs. He had dark hair, an excellent and well-formed figure, was broad of shoulder and muscular, with the shapeliest legs in the kingdom. He was not startlingly good-looking, but his was a face that instantly dominated all around him. His eyes were small, often half-closed, but they missed nothing. An Italian traveller seeing him one day at mass in Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, recorded:
My eyes met his only once. The moment I began to look at him I felt the secret power of the King’s majesty and an insatiable curiosity to study it; but I found that I had to drop my eyes. Afterwards I dared to look at him only when I was sure he could not see me.7
Apart from the eyes, and the sensual lips, Louis’ most striking feature was his long, beaked and powerful nose. Some historians reckoned that, through his Aragon ancestors, he had both Jewish and Moorish blood. But what was most important was the all-imposing presence. He had perfect manners, never passing a woman without lifting his hat, even down to the humblest chambermaid. The style was catching. Well could Voltaire remark in retrospect that Europe “owed her manners and her feeling for social life to the court of Louis XIV.” He was instinctively kind—unlike his father—but pity anyone who should cross him; to wit the fate of his unfortunate Superintendent of Finances, Nicolas Fouquet.
If Louis had a major flaw, it was love of flattery, even the most clumsy praise, and—coupled with this—a passion for the trappings of la gloire that eventually was to prove his undoing, and all but fatal for France. His majesty was immense. Yet, even apart from the inevitable aphrodisiac of power, and the droit de seigneur (to which Louis resorted more frequently than any other), he would have been overpoweringly attractive to women. As well as his unflagging energy as a lover, Louis’ legendary capacity for work made his position as absolute ruler that much harder to challenge. He would work six hours a day in his Council, assuming responsibility for signing vouchers for the least state expenditure, while keeping his own personal memorandum book that amounted to the nation’s journal and ledger. On top of this, until his middle years, there was nothing Louis liked better than leading his armies in quest of la gloire in the field, and being painted or sculpted mounted atop a rampant charger.
All this vitality was fuelled by a vast consumption of food; he was particularly partial to game and highly spiced sauces—much to the concern of his physicians, who would have to purge and bleed him with distressful regularity for the attendant disorders. Though, by the 1680s, the Diary of the King’s Health already ran to several hundred pages, it was fortunate that Louis was blessed with a constitution of iron. By reputation he had been born, like a camel, with two stomachs (on his autopsy, his bowels were discovered to be twice the normal length); the productivity of the royal alimentary canal was a regular source of scatological marvel to sycophantic courtiers attendant at the King’s highly public daily levé.
ALTHOUGH LOUIS was progressively to neglect building and development in Paris in favour of Versailles, in the early period under Colbert (who from 1664 had also become Superintendent of Buildings) much of distinction was achieved. He built the Collège des Quatre Nations—for which purpose Mazarin had left in his will 2 million livres, earmarked to provide a Parisian education for sixty boys from the provinces. The old Tour de Nesle, notorious since the time of Philippe le Bel, was demolished, and in its place rose the superb piece of baroque designed by Le Vau, which was later to become the home of the Académie Française. Next came the completion of the Louvre, inviting from Rome Gian-Lorenzo Bernini whose piazza of St. Peter’s had established him as the most famous architect of his day. Bernini flattered Louis indecently, producing a bust that was probably the best likeness of the Roi Soleil ever achieved, which now graces Versailles. But, architecturally, they soon fell out and with Louis’ departure for Versailles the Louvre fell on hard times, which would last until its definitive salvation by Napoleon.
In the confident expectation of future peace, Louis now decreed the levelling of the existing Parisian ramparts. In their place, he laid out long and straight promenades which came to be known as the grands boulevards (a corruption of the German word Bollwerk,meaning a “bulwark” or rampart). Agreeably lined with shady trees, they immediately became places to promenade, while wealthy Parisians built stately houses looking out on to them. The greatest of these boulevards was the new Champs-Élysées, laid out by Le Nôtre. Then, on the Left Bank came the monumental edifice of the Invalides to house the veterans of Louis’ wars (and one day, Napoleon).
François Blondel, first director of the new Académie Royale d’Architecture, drew on the King’s patronage and vision to promote a style of unprecedented classical harmony which embraced la gloire and spectacle in the grander Parisian buildings. Imposing straight lines became the norm. In a foretaste of modern city planning, strict rules were laid down; private dwellings had to be built of stone, not timber and plaster (the catastrophic Fire of London in 1667 had left a message well heeded by Colbert and Louis’ town planners), and were forbidden by law to have their first floors bulge out over the street. In the grand hôtels particuliers of the epoch, extensive gardens and conspicuous consumption within would be concealed from public gaze behind a sombre portecochère giving on to the street.
The Grande Siècle saw the emancipation of the French bourgeoisie; but perhaps as a hangover from the days of the Frondes, or of their own shady dealings, the Paris financiers had become obsessed by their own security. Affluent Paris was to become, and remain, a city as secret as any North African casbah. Truly, Louis XIV inherited a city of brick and left it marble. But, with the disappearance of the warm brickwork panels of Henri IV and Louis XIII, the tasteful Place Royale gave way to the bourgeois vulgarity of Vaux-le-Vicomte; and, if one seeks a monument to the taste of the Roi Soleil one only has to contemplate the florid excesses of Boule furniture.
The new money moved steadily westwards, up the new Champs-Élysées and away from the compressed and smelly confines of the Marais. Main thoroughfares were paved; streets were widened, and overhanging medieval houses that might have damaged passing carriages were removed. Colbert was to go down in the history of Paris as the city’s “greatest urbanist”8—second only to Louis-Napoleon’s Baron Haussmann. He dreamed of creating “a new Rome”; but his works were never completed. As recorded by the marvellously detailed paintings of Hubert Robert, far more change was to be carried out under the reigns of Louis XV and XVI than by Colbert; certainly most of the depredations to the churches of Paris occurred in the years of 1790 to 1860. Colbert regarded Versailles as “an isolated, rural château,” in no way fit to be the headquarters of Europe’s greatest king. But one year after the move to Versailles, in 1683, Colbert died (possibly with his heart broken, too, like Le Vau). Among so much else he had cleaned up the city and the streets of Paris—although a perceptive visiting English doctor, Martin Lister, found how water from the Seine was “very pernicious to all strangers, not the French excepted . . . causing Looseness and sometimes Dysenteries.”
MORE PERNICIOUS STILL were “no-go” areas left in the aftermath of the Frondes, which the guard did not dare to enter. For the year 1642 alone, 342 murders took place at night hours on the streets of Paris. Under the threesome of Louis, Colbert and La Reynie—prosecutor of the A faire des Poisons—and under his equally fearsome successor, d’Argenson, there was to be a nation-wide codification of criminal and civil law the like of which would not be seen again until Napoleon. Highly modern-sounding techniques were deployed to apprehend criminals, such as hand-writing analysis. In one case, the King personally intervened to have the police send out “identikit” sketches to prevent a fugitive skipping the frontier; in another, a murderer had shaved off his beard and donned a blond wig—but La Reynie warned Colbert to look out for him in disguise among the crowd at Versailles. The man was duly caught and executed. Another of La Reynie’s first tasks was to provide Paris with a system of street lighting, so that by the end of the seventeenth century there were 6500 lamps on public streets—a marked improvement over contemporary London. Parisians enjoyed a sense of security the like of which had not existed since the all-too-brief days of Henri IV. Nevertheless, a situation was created in which lawyers thrived and became men of substance and importance.
By comparison with the draconian punishments inflicted under the regime of Philippe le Bel, or even when one recalls the grisly fate of the assassin of Henri IV, Ravaillac, penalties imposed under Louis XIV seem positively enlightened. Miscarriages of justice were redressed, with capital punishment for wrongful death sentences. Hanging was the norm— except for nobles, who were entitled to the privilege of being beheaded. As witnessed by the fates of the wretched Brinvilliers and Voisin, torture and burning at the stake were still reserved for the poisoner. From the time of Henri IV onward, distaste for the more extreme forms of torture had grown; though, even in the years of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, some would receive the hideous fate of being broken on the wheel.
For less serious offences, there were the galleys—an archaic form of punishment that also provided the backbone of the French Navy well after Louis XIV. The much-feared Bastille, where the average stay was short, was in Louis’ reign more like a comfortable hotel for the rich in trouble. Many of the residents were there through a member of the family obtaining one of the infamous lettres de cachet, or “sealed warrants.” Almost a thousand of these a year were issued by Louis, providing for “detention” rather than imprisonment. They were a convenient way of applying to get rid of an inconvenient relative, or of wives seeking to discipline a wayward husband (it was a punishment meted out to the Marquis de Sade in the following century). The worst fate for courtiers, in the event of royal disfavour, was the terrible sentence of exile to the miscreant’s country estates, there to die of lingering boredom—a condemnation worse than hell for any Frenchman. Prostitutes, given the choice, preferred the option of becoming nuns,41 but would often be transhipped to the colonies, to Canada or Louisiana, to expiate their sins by incrementing the settlers’ birth rate. Such was the immortalised end of Manon Lescaut.
As with most societies, crime was closely linked with poverty— which remained appalling, despite all measures to ameliorate it. The nation, and the cities in particular, were vulnerable to crises in the countryside, such as that in the early 1660s when Colbert found himself forced to import food from as far off as Poland. As always, it was the poor who came off worst; hunger was never far removed for the urban under-privileged, as the price of bread rose constantly.
BY CONTRAST, affluent Frenchmen found themselves able to indulge in the pursuit of leisure—and pleasure. Apart from the periodic grand spectacles that were guaranteed to engage and distract, there were games such as the jeu de paume—predecessor of our modern tennis, and greatly favoured by the King. It became immensely popular, with no fewer than 114 courts springing up in Paris alone. Under Louis, gambling (largely banned) became all the rage—notably at Versailles. Recorded Mme. de Sévigné, “one plays here for terrifying sums, and the gamblers are like madmen. One howls, another strikes the table with such a blow that it resounds round the whole room.” On Christmas Day 1678, Mme. de Montespan lost 700,000 écus, but, possibly with the connivance of the banker, the King’s mistress was permitted to win it all back. Louis was all for gambling of every kind; the opiate of the nobles, it afforded one very simple means of domesticating them.
Under the reign of the Roi Soleil, the theatre and the opera prospered—though naturally it was Paris, centre of all the arts, that was the focus. Like a pearl, a flourishing of the arts usually requires a set of special conditions in which to be seeded. Could Shakespeare have produced what he did without the immense self-assurance of Elizabeth’s England?42 In France the sombre tragedies of Racine might have flourished in the times of Henri IV and Louis XIII, but almost certainly it required the sureties of the reign of the Louis XIV for a Molière to make such mock of human frailties. Could there have been such hilarious farces as those which so effectively flayed social affectations, performed in any previous age? Would the Fables of La Fontaine, with all their taunting scepticism, have fallen on such fertile ground? And what about the biting wit of La Rochefoucauld and his cynical Maxims? They would not have appealed without the worldly pragmatism that swept a France disenchanted by the religious wars of the previous century—and which would form an important part of the philosophical backdrop to 1789.
The taste for the theatre, as in many things, came from the King down, his passion for the stage rivalled only by his love for building. By the end of the seventeenth century, it was reckoned that the Comédie Française could count between 10,000 and 17,000 regular patrons. The educated upper classes and the rowdy, turbulent denizens of the pit alike would pay for the privilege of performances ten to twelve times a year. In the Paris theatre violence was never far off. The great Molière always had the adroitness to address his shafts to the standing room—the parterre. Even at his theatre in 1668, some soldiers killed the unfortunate door-keeper for refusing them free entry. This was despite Molière’s royal protection and his company’s title of the Troupe de Roi.
LOUIS WAS THE FIRST of France’s monarchs to offer consistent support for artists and writers. Molière was also protected by the King from the wrath of the Establishment dévots in the fierce row that broke out over his semi-sacrilegious Tartu fe. Born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, the son of a court upholsterer, in 1622, Molière perhaps typified as well as anyone else the triumph of the bourgeoisie under Louis. (Racine, an orphan brought up by the Jansenist school at Port Royal, came of a middle-class family from the Aisne; Lully was the son of an Italian miller; François Couperin, the greatest of five generations of eminent musicians, came of a family of simple organists; Boileau, the poet and critic, stemmed from the legal bourgeoisie.) Molière first managed to catch the eye of the King in 1658, through fairly outrageous forwardness, and adopted the name of de Molière—thereby revealing himself to be prone to the very faiblesses he later mocked. His immense reputation was grounded in a thorough training of years as both actor and manager/director. But it was his plays, with their invariable theme of the study of man—and contemporary man at that—his foibles and his pretensions, that made Molière’s reputation, and drew him frequently into sharp controversy, including barrages of onslaught inside the Académie.
For thirteen years Molière’s company took root in Richelieu’s old quarters of the Palais-Royal. Here Paris witnessed the flowering of Molière’s rapier wit: in L’Avare, excoriating the destructive consequences of the pursuit of riches; The Misanthrope, with its confrontation between coquetry and sincerity taken to excess; Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, with its attack on bourgeois pretensions, Le Malade Imaginaire, with its attack on hypochondria and medical quackery; and his daring Tartu fe, with its attack on religious hypocrisy. For all the King’s backing, Molière may well have been fortunate not to be around after the accession of Mme. de Maintenon and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. It was said by one of his contemporaries that, rather than provoking belly-laughs, Molière had the unique knack of making his audience “rire dans l’âme,” which probably explains his timeless appeal. He died in harness, aged only fifty-one, ironically during the fourth performance of Le Malade Imaginaire. Collapsing on the stage, he was reported to have said, apologetically: “Sirs, I have played le Malade Imaginaire; but in truth I have a grave malady.” Two hours later he was dead.43
ANOTHER LITERARY FIGURE to receive the King’s favour and patronage was Boileau, the poet, satirist and critic renowned for his acid wit, who with Racine was appointed Historiographer Royal. On hearing that a cannon ball had narrowly missed Louis on one of his campaigns, Boileau remarked to him: “Sire, I beg you as your historian not to finish my history too soon.” The King liked this kind of cheek, and Boileau went unreproved. Then there was Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–87), the ugly Italian—dirty, untidy, coarse, and a heavy drinker who later became totally debauched. But he was the father of French opera’s first golden age. A typical Lully production, in 1672, would open with the inevitable prologue depicting the Sun (Louis, of course) defeating Envy and the Serpent (Holland, the current enemy). Lully was a dictator in his realm, but everywhere was the guiding hand of the King. It was Louis himself who selected the dramatist Philippe Quinault (also of humble birth, the son of a Paris baker) to produce the libretti for Lully’s operas.
The King’s patronage could be subject to whim. The great Corneille, for instance, was allowed to die a pauper in 1684, embittered by neglect and the success of his young rival, Racine. In 1701, after the Comédie Italienne had lampooned Mme. de Maintenon, the heavy hand of censorship descended on the theatre of Paris. Though honoured by the public, for many a long year the acting profession was repudiated by the Church, its members—however respectable—excommunicated. Molière’s widow had the utmost difficulty in obtaining for him a decent, Catholic burial in consecrated ground. Even in the eighteenth century, the Age of Reason, the great tragic actress, Adrienne Lecouvreur, was refused proper burial and her remains were interred under a Paris street corner—to the rage of her friend Voltaire, who stigmatised it as a disgraceful act of intolerance.
BETWEEN 1660 AND 1700, over 600 novels appeared in Paris—and many of them were written by Mme. (Madeleine) de Scudéry, who ran an influential and gossipy salon, the salon itself being very much an invention of the epoch. Employing a style of fiction that would today be designatedroman héroïque, the length of her novels were only exceeded by her conspicuous longevity.44 Her novels, running to 15,000 pages, unashamedly praised aristocratic privileges and manners, and extolled the relentless virtue of her heroines. The naughty Ninon de Lenclos, the most famous courtesan of her time, dubbed the members of her salon les Jansenistes de l’Amour (after the austere religious sect) “because they speak a lot about love, but never make it!” Nevertheless, several of her fans in the Académie (where she won a prize for eloquence) tried to have the ban on women lifted so that she could join the Immortels.
Here one might perhaps append a note on just how relatively liberated, at least compared with other ages, were Parisian women under Louis XIV. Such a shamelessly free-living libertine spirit as Ninon de Lenclos, with her repartee of “je me fais homme” (I behave like a man), was widely accepted in Parisian society. The virtuous Anne of Austria had tried to have her locked up in a convent, but she protested that she was “neither a whore nor repentant,” and eventually she arose triumphant: “the triumph of vice conducted with wit,” as Saint-Simon put it with grudging admiration. Once the flame of vice had dimmed, Ninon was to be seen regularly receiving the Archbishop and other worthy dignitaries in her salon—and indeed declining an invitation from her old friend, Mme. de Maintenon, to move to gloomy Versailles to cheer up the increasingly morose monarch.
IF ONLY LOUIS HAD STUCK to the pursuit of la gloire in the boudoir, or in his insatiable urge to build, all might have been well. But he was obsessed by the great military exploits of the Caesars, of Charlemagne and his grandfather, Henri IV. After defeating the Fronde, aged only thirty, he admitted, unashamed: “My dominant passion is certainly love of glory.” On the most slender of pretexts, he had already fought a hugely successful campaign against his wife’s country, Spain. Almost without battle he acquired in 1668 the key cities of Lille, Douai and Tournai in Spanish Flanders. A cheap victory, signed at Aix-la-Chapelle, gave him a taste for more.
In 1683, Louis’ prudent counsellor, Colbert, died. For the last decade he had been in a losing battle against the Marquis de Louvois, whom Louis made his Minister of War. An arrogant, unscrupulous genius, as the ageing Colbert declined, Louvois became virtually Minister of Foreign Affairs. From a disorganised mob at the time of Louis’ coronation he had turned the French Army into the most formidable in Europe, and increased the number of galleys in the navy from six to forty, each containing 200 wretches. Originally they were manned by criminals and Turks taken in the Barbary Wars. When the Turks were worn out, they were sold into slavery and replaced by French Protestants caught attempting to emigrate illegally. Worst of all, Louvois was responsible for the worst crimes against humanity committed in the reign of the Roi Soleil: the assault on the Spanish Netherlands (1672), the laying waste of Heidelberg and the German Palatinate (1689), and the dragonnades massacres of Protestants in south-west France.
By 1670 France was the strongest power in Europe; she had no need of a vast army. As would have been the preference of Vauban, Europe’s greatest builder of fortresses—exquisite works of art in themselves— France could have defended her frontiers without resort to war. Vauban hated the bombardments of open cities in which Louvois revelled, but Louvois pushed towards war for the satisfaction of a monarch already bent upon la gloire.
Instead of pursuing the follies of his forebears in Italy, Louis turned his gaze north-eastwards, to a richer prey. Having proclaimed their independence from Spain, the United Provinces of Holland were the economic success story of the century. They had driven out the sea by their network of dykes and acquired immense wealth from their trading colonies in southeast Asia. Even the great French philosopher Descartes had selected Holland for its liberalism in preference to Paris. But in 1672 Louis launched a carefully planned war of unprovoked aggression against this prosperous tiny neighbour. Typical of the brutality in which the campaign was carried out was the following instruction from Louvois: “His Majesty commanded me to inform you that he wishes you to burn twenty villages as close as possible to Charleroi . . . so that not a single house in these twenty villages remains standing.”
Louis was more motivated by greed than by his dislike for staunch Dutch Protestantism. The proud Dutch flooded their dykes and the war dragged on for seven years. Holland was ruined financially, but managed to keep its frontiers intact. All the war achieved for France, through the Treaty of Nijmegen, was the (temporary) acquisition of Lorraine and the definitive cession of the Franche-Comté—plus some magnificent paintings and tapestries of the Roi Soleil, astride a prancing horse crossing the Rhine or besieging Maastricht. For Louis it was the apogee of la gloire, and dangerously inspired his ambitions towards the rest of Europe— particularly England, where Holland’s champion, William of Orange, was about to assume the throne.
Louis’ new swagger brought all his neighbours (bar Switzerland) to unite against him in the League of Augsburg. To pre-empt them, Louis marched across the Rhine, took Cologne and devastated the Palatinate. It was an excess that would poison the perception of France by Germans for decades, if not centuries. After nine more years of war, which undid many of Colbert’s domestic advances, Louis was forced to renounce virtually all his gains.
The glorious reign ended, ingloriously, in yet another war—the War of the Spanish Succession. This time it was one which Louis had not sought but had blundered into. It was a war in which, for the first time since the Hundred Years’ War, England had been stirred—to send a major force deep into the heart of the continent. Under Marlborough, humiliating defeat was inflicted on France: Blenheim, where Louis lost 30,000 out of an army of 50,000, and Gibraltar (both in 1704); Ramillies in 1706 and Oudenarde in 1708, and bloody Malplaquet where 11,000 French died in 1709. “God seems to have forgotten all I have done for him,” grumbled Louis. In 1708, Lille was lost. The following year Nature entered the war on the side of the Alliance, inflicting on France the harshest winter on record. France lost half her livestock; at Versailles even Louis lost both his confessor and a former mistress. To continue to finance the war, Louis was forced to melt down his gold plate. Finally, as if in further punishment for his hubris, a terrible sequence of illnesses would decimate his family and menace the succession.
In 1712, the victorious allies were mustering to advance on Paris and it looked as if the country was facing total defeat. Then Marshal Villars turned the tide with a brilliant sequence of victories which, within six weeks, had driven the invaders out of France. An ailing Louis was able— just—to conclude an honourable peace at Utrecht in 1713. France, and the monarchy, was saved. But Marlborough’s successful intervention on the continent had opened the prospect of a British Empire, and the economic ruin of all that Colbert had built up—with the value of the livre depreciated 25 per cent between 1683 and the Treaty of Utrecht.
ABOUT THE TIME of the move to Versailles, a fundamental change in the love-life of the hedonistic king had taken place. From the early 1660s, more or less synchronous with the beginning of his passion for Versailles, there had followed a series of mistresses coupled with casual affairs. Husbands were encouraged to sacrifice their wives to the pleasure of the Roi Soleil; “to share with Jupiter involves no slightest dishonour” was the accepted, if not altogether popular prescription. Out of all these liaisons came a whole raft of illegitimates.
By 1676 there were whispered worries around the court at the King having become excessively, indeed startlingly, promiscuous. It also seems that the prodigious sexual energy of the King, though only in his mid-forties, was showing signs of decline. Following the A faire des Poisons, when La Montespan was dispatched and Mme. de Maintenon moved into the vacuum, Louis’ sexual urges were to be kept closely in check, his Catholic conscience more rigorously activated. Born Françoise d’Aubigné, Mme. de Maintenon had married a (very) minor poetaster called Paul Scarron, much older than herself and a cripple—allegedly— shaped like the letter Z. She had no children by Scarron and, after eight years’ marriage, he had died—leaving his widow still with her virginity intact, but little money. After she became governess to the delicate little son of Louis and Athénaïs de Montespan, she gradually assumed more and more influence with the King; until one day she swapped places with the fallen Montespan, passing her—so it was recorded—on the staircase with the dry observation: “You are going down, Madame? I am going up.” And so it was.
The Marquise de Maintenon, as she became, was three years older than him, beyond the age of childbearing, and with some of the traditional qualities of the governess—handsome, but certainly no beauty, and pious to a fault. Late in life she would speak about her “long struggle for the King’s soul.” In return, the King referred to her as “Your Solidity.” There remained a mystery as to whether they were ever married, morganatically. Certainly with her a sharp change of mood became apparent. In 1683, the year after the move to Versailles, the Queen— Spanish Infanta to the end, dividing her time between her Spanish confessor and Spanish maid—died, in the arms of Mme. de Maintenon. “Poor woman” was the King’s immortal epitaph: “It’s the only time she has ever given me any trouble.” The Widow Scarron’s power at court was now total.
UNDER HER INFLUENCE, and with Louvois at the King’s ear, Louis embarked on his choice of war not love. Worst of all for the future of France, although her grandfather had been a Protestant, and a friend of Henri IV, Scarron egged Louis on to take the fateful step of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685. For years he had been quietly oppressing the Protestants, but within the liberal laws laid down by his grandfather. Then, in the period just preceding the move to Versailles, he began to think of ways of converting all of the Protestants. In 1681, Mme. de Maintenon rejoiced: “If God preserve the King there will not be one Huguenot left twenty years hence.” Four years later the blow fell. His outspoken sister-in-law, Liselotte, Duchess of Orléans, explained acidly:
The old trollop [Mme. de Maintenon] and Père La Chaise persuaded the King that all the sins he had committed with Montespan would be forgiven if he persecuted and expelled the Huguenots and by doing this he would get to Heaven...9
Accordingly the edict went out that “All temples of the . . . so-called reformed religion should be demolished forthwith” and any assembly for public worship by Protestants banned. Only this policy of annihilation would sate Louis’ stringent desire for unity and order.
Louvois added an extra note of horror to Louis’ Revocation policy with the brutal dragonnades, armed raids accompanied by torture, pillage and scorched-earth against Protestant dissenters in the provinces— such as Kosovo was to experience three centuries later. Languedoc in particular was made to suffer. Between 1657 and October 1685 more than 587 Protestant churches were demolished throughout France. Within a matter of months of the Revocation, France’s Protestants had been reduced by three-quarters: most had become Catholics; some had emigrated; others had been sent to the galleys. Goods and property were confiscated, to further inhibit them from leaving the country. Protestants were excluded from public positions, and decent livelihoods. There was violence against them in the countryside, where they were obliged to go to mass and take communion; those spitting out the host were to be burned alive.
Some of the most prestigious among the Protestant nobility in Paris were now expedited to the Bastille by lettre de cachet, subject to a strict regime and freed only once they converted. Many died in prison and were interred without confession in the garden of the château. The zealots could boast that heresy had been “trampled underfoot in 1685.” Among the Parisian Protestants were leading painters, sculptors, architects and court musicians as well as businessmen and public servants— France lost 400,000 of her finest subjects. It could indeed be rated the greatest mistake of the whole reign.10
Many of France’s leaders in finance, industry and science fled the country after 1685. They included men like Christiaan Huygens— inventor of the pendulum clock and the first to derive the theory that the stars were in fact other suns—who returned to his native Holland. Silk-makers immigrated to England, glassmakers to Denmark, and 600 army officers departed to reinforce the ranks of France’s enemies. At the battle of the Boyne, hundreds of French Huguenots fought in the ranks of William of Orange against the Irish Catholics. Encouraged by Frederick the Great, one important faction ended up in Prussia. By 1700 between a third and a half the population of Berlin was reckoned to be refugees from Louis’ misguided religious strategy. Later, descendants of these Huguenot refugees would lead the cohorts invading France in three successive wars from 1870 onwards: men like General von François in the First World War, and Admiral Souchon, commander of the brilliant escape of the battle-cruiser Goeben, which would bring Turkey into the war on Germany’s side, and in the Second World War Luftwa fe ace, Adolf Galland.
Further afield, the Revocation also hardened Protestant opinion abroad, with Benjamin Franklin recalling how, as a child, he had heard the preacher in Philadelphia’s Old South Church inveigh against “that accursed man, persecutor of God’s people, Louis the Fourteenth.” The League of Augsburg, uniting as it did France’s enemies against her, was but one consequence, while the loss of capital accompanying the waves of Huguenot émigrés was incalculable. Indeed, one could almost make the parallel that Louis’ folly in driving out the Huguenots compared with the catastrophe Hitler wrought on Germany in depriving her of the Jewish intelligentsia, among them the scientists and physicists who would eventually design the atomic bomb to put the final lid on Nazi ambitions.
The Huguenots were not the only religious body to feel the scourge of royal bigotry. The Jansenists were a gloomy sect, founded by a Dutchman called Cornelius Jansenius (1585–1638), who had sought a return to the simplicity of the early Christians, with beliefs in free will and predestination reminiscent of Calvin’s. In their austerity they often seemed holier than the Jesuits, and it was sometimes said that Louis hated the Jansenists even more than the Protestants. Among the eminent supporters of Jansenism was Blaise Pascal (1623–62), a frail genius who died when he was only thirty-nine. One of the stars in the firmament of the Roi Soleil, he postulated one of the key philosophical questions of the reign: “Is Christianity primarily a religion of reason or a religion of love?” But Pascal died before his great work, the Apologie de la Religion Chrétienne, could be finished.
AS LOUIS FOUGHT HIS BATTLES, and threw his energies and the state’s resources into developing Versailles, so in the years 1689–97 military misadventure again exacerbated the plight of the poor. Then, in 1693, a poor harvest (compounded by inefficient and probably corrupt means of storing grain) made the nation hunger for peace. A new prayer, at once seditious and blasphemous, went the rounds:
Our Father who art in Versailles, thy name is no longer hallowed; thy kingdom is diminished; thy will is no longer done on earth or on the waves. Give us our bread, which we totally lack . . . and deliver us from the Maintenon. Amen.11
Encapsulated concentrically around the person of the King, life went on at Versailles. Surely the politest, most courteous monarch there ever was, he lived among some 10,000 courtiers, virtually without a guard. For all the numbing grandeur of Versailles, the ennuimust have been excruciating. Where other absolute rulers had secret police, or barbed wire, or a Berlin Wall, the secret weapon of the Roi Soleil and his Bourbon successors was boredom. To keep the French aristocracy at his fingertips was all part of Louis’ essential apparatus of state, but in the long term it also proved the ruin of every element of local government in France.
At Versailles in the morning, the King worked with his ministers, three or four at most, to preserve secrecy. The Dauphin was kept out of everything; “Monsieur,” the King’s brother, was allowed in to deal with unimportant matters once a fortnight, while Philippe, who was to become regent, fared no better. The afternoon would be occupied with hunting, with masques and elaborate entertainments among the grottoes, or dallying in the groves populated by gods and goddesses of classical antiquity, or boating on the magnificent canals Le Nôtre had dug for him; except on Good Friday and Easter day when the royal family would spend the whole day in church. After supper would be some amusement, such as a ball or masquerade or concert—and the endless gambling complained of by Mme. de Sévigné, leading to the ruin and self-exile of many a courtier too anxious to cut a dash in front of his sovereign. Every event of the day was accompanied by music; the violins played during the levé and at lunch; hautbois, flutes and sackbuts accompanied his walks through the park; there were motets by Lully during chapel; at supper extracts would be played from his favourite operas; even at the coucher somebody would sing a new tune or cantata.
Just as Louis was seen every moment of the day, so he saw everybody and everything: “not one escaped him, not even those who hoped to remain unnoticed,” recorded Saint-Simon. The prospects of “a man I never see” were dim indeed.
Following the marriage of the doted-on Marie-Adélaïde to his grandson, in 1697, the great ball of the reign took place in the Galerie des Glaces. The Roi Soleil’s family life had never seemed sunnier. He was the most favoured, as well as the most powerful monarch on earth. In manners, style and the arts—in almost all things—other nations tried to model themselves on France. French furniture and French porcelain were to be seen everywhere in the houses of the rich all over Europe. Led by France, there was virtually a common European civilisation, which was French and aristocratic. French was, and remained, the international language of polite society. For Frederick the Great of Prussia, French became his language of choice, with orders to his own prime minister even written in it.
Then, for Louis, a terrible sequence of reversals began. The bad omens were there the very year of the move to Versailles with the death in labour of the Dauphine, as she gave birth to Louis’ first grandson, the Duc de Bourgogne. Charmingly, the quacks prescribed that a sheep be flayed alive in her room, and the ailing princess wrapped in its skin; the ladies-in-waiting were horrified; the Dauphine died in agony anyway. Then, in 1701, queer old “Monsieur” died of a stroke, supposedly brought on by a row with his elder brother. “And so ended this year, 1701,” wrote Saint-Simon, “and all the happiness of the King with it.” Even Louis now seemed to weary of the polished regularity of court. Carrying with it the seeds of its own destruction, and a bill that would be paid for in 1789, for all its splendours, Versailles was to become a kind of forerunner of the horrible self-contained habitation or unité imposed on France by the Swiss Corbusier in the twentieth century. Mme. de Maintenon complained: “Symmetry, symmetry, if I stay much longer here I shall become paralytic. Not a door or a window will shut. . . .” Displeasure with the world she had helped create seems to have got her down to the extent of even inviting Ninon from Paris to reside at Versailles and liven things up—as a kind of seventeenth-century Pamela Harriman. Wisely, Ninon declined, for Paris once more had become more fun than Versailles; and even at the risk of permanent expulsion from paradise, more and more courtiers trickled off to the pleasures of a libertine city, as piety and ever more sober rules replaced the old, fun-loving regime of the younger Louis.
1702 brought the disastrous Wars of the Spanish Succession— something that Louis never wanted, but into which he was entrapped by the diplomatic follies of the past. “The Pyrenees are no more,” Louis was supposed to have declared arrogantly. Europe, however, refusing to see a Bourbon prince on the throne of Spain, united against Louis. Marlborough marched to Blenheim and back, destroying French armies on every side as he went. In 1706, a total eclipse of the sun seemed like a portent for the Roi Soleil. The following year, Dutch scouts—full of vengeance for past injuries—pushed almost to Versailles. Living from hour to hour, the court prepared to evacuate to Chambord.
THE WINTER OF 1709 brought perhaps the worst cold ever recorded; in Paris, on 13 January, the thermometer fell below −21°F, and even sunny Provence registered temperatures of −16°F. Altogether France lost half of its livestock that winter; vines everywhere were killed. In Burgundy, children were reported living off boiled grass and roots; “Some even crop the fields like sheep.” The Seine froze solid, the cold killing even Louis’ confessor, Père La Chaise. Impoverished by war, for which he had melted down his gold plate yet again, Louis was unable to pay for the “King’s bread” of past years that had sustained the poor of Paris—except by raising fresh taxes. On his way out hunting, the Dauphin found his way barred by ravenous women clamouring for food. Wolves again roamed the provinces. In Paris, 24,000 people died that winter. Mobs set off ominously for Versailles amid rumours that Mme. de Maintenon was buying up wheat. The chief of police, d’Argenson, feared a calamity: “I foresee that the fires will soon burn in this capital and I fear they will be difficult to extinguish.”
Mme. de Maintenon could not lift Louis’ depression. “Sometimes,” she recorded, “he has a fit of crying that he cannot control, sometimes he is not well. He has no conversation.” France’s leading light had fallen into dark introspection, but his personal afflictions had hardly begun. In 1711, “Monseigneur” the Dauphin, kept in infuriating isolation at Marly, where he “stood in the corner whistling and tapping his snuff-box,” caught smallpox and died. All Louis’ hopes and affections now centred around his grandson, the new Dauphin, a serious young man of twenty-nine who reflected Louis’ own capacity for hard work, and his twenty-five-year-old wife, Marie-Adélaïde of Savoy, whom Louis adored and whose charm and gaiety had brought new life to an ageing court. But, in January 1712, while Louis was still in mourning for his son, Marie-Adélaïde caught measles, and she died on 9 February. Ten days later, her husband succumbed to the same disease. In March—as the Allies were beginning to threaten Versailles—their fiveyear-old son, Louis, was gathered. Suspicions of poisoning arose against Philippe, the new Duc d’Orléans, a libertine known to read Rabelais during mass, whom the deaths brought close to the throne. Panic swept the court, though Louis kept his head, murmuring piously to Villars:
Few have known what it is to lose, but I have lost in the space of a few weeks, a grandson, a granddaughter-in-law and their son. God punishes me, and I have deserved it. I shall suffer less in the next world.
At the end of the terrible year, 1712, the fall of France to the Allies was averted by Villars’ miraculous eleventh-hour counter-stroke. But Louis would only briefly enjoy his country’s liberation. On 13 August 1715, the King felt a stabbing pain in his left leg; ten days later, despite prescriptions of massive doses of asses’ milk, it turned black. Gangrene had set in. Louis sent for his heir, his five-year-old great-grandson, and told him “Mignon, you are going to be a great King” and passed him this lapidary last testament:
Try to remain at peace with your neighbours. I have loved war too much. Do not copy me in that, or in my over-spending . . . Lighten your people’s burden as soon as possible, and do what I have had the misfortune not to do myself . . .
On 1 September 1715, the Roi Soleil was extinct, four days short of his seventy-seventh birthday, and having reigned for seventy-two years and a quarter. “His name cannot be uttered without respect, without linking it to an eternally memorable century,” wrote Voltaire with a degree of homage rare for so sceptical a critic. Yet, as the great King was put to rest, Voltaire also could remember seeing little tents set up along the road to Saint-Denis, along which the funeral cortège would pass, where “people were drinking, singing and laughing.” Perhaps more accurate was Albert Sorel’s stricture: “He carried the principle of monarchy to its utmost limit and abused it—to the point of excess.” 12
Louis’ long reign, the longest in French if not in European history, had begun with the brutal Frondes and the child-King’s coming of age; in the 1660s and 1670s Louis and Colbert made energetic reforms amid Paris scandal; then the move to Versailles introduced, from 1682 on, the period of Louis’ self-indulgence in affairs and foreign wars, followed by decline from the turn of the century until his death in 1715.
The old monarch had begun to seem immortal, imposing burdens on his nation without any expectation of redress, ruling by his will alone—the most absolute of absolute monarchs. Now the grand siècle was truly over. For France Louis had achieved a certain (but by no means universal) prosperity, stability and semblance of order; but now there were heavy bills that would shortly be due for payment.