Louisxiv Essay, Research Paper

Louis XIV of France ranks as one of the most remarkable monarchs in history. He reigned for 72 years, 54 of those in which he personally controlled French government. The seventeenth century is labeled as the age of Louis XIV. Dubbed the Sun King during his own life time, his rule has since been hailed as the supreme example of a type of government– absolutism. When Louis died, few of his subjects could remember any other monarch, for he epitomized the ideal of kingship.

Louis XIV was born on September 5th, 1638, the son of Louis XIII and Anne of Austria. His parents marriage had been childless for over 20 years, and the birth of this male heir was hailed as a gift from God. He became known as Louis le Dieudonne ( Louis the God-given ). Yet behind the rejoicing lay an uneasy sense that all was not well in France.

Since 1635 Louis XIII had been fighting a two-front war against Spain and the Holy Roman Empire to protect French territory from Hapsburg encirclement. Upon his death in May 1643, Anne of Austria was declared Queen Regent and took Cardinal Jules Mazarin as her chief minister. The two were heavily accused of deliberately prolonging the conflict as it dragged on and made economic conditions deteriorate. Although the Peace of Westphalia (October 24th, 1648) ended the war against the Emperor, the quarrel with Spain showed no sign of being resolved.

In 1648, France s chief law court, the parlement of Paris, insisted that it had a right to be consulted over major decisions of the state. This example was followed by many provincial parlements and triggered five years of civil war known as the Frondes. This and the series of dramatic events that followed it coincided with several catastrophic harvests and an outbreak of plague.

Perhaps the most significant effect of the Frondes was the impact it had on the young Louis XIV. He never forgot the collapse of public order and the shock of twice having to leave Paris. His later policies – his suspicion of the parlements, his desire to tame the nobility, and his search for firm monarchical government – can only be explained in the context of the disastrous political breakdown which he had witnessed as a boy.

Although Louis had legally come of age in September 1651, this actually changed the distribution of power very little. Anne of Austria, although no longer regent, remained leader of the Council of State, while Cardinal Mazarin was still first minister. After 1653, royal powers were gradually consolidated, and France slowly gained the upper hand in the war against Spain. The Peace of the Pyrenees (June 6th 1659) gave France several important strategic sites and effectively marked Spain s eclipse as the leading power in Europe. The new peace was symbolized by Louis XIV s marriage to the Spanish King s daughter Marie-Therese in 1660. This marriage was arranged by Mazarin in order to end the quarrel between France and Spain as well as to secure the right to Spanish succession. However, Mazarin did not attend the glorious ceremony, he was already seriously ill and died on March 9th, 1661. That same year, Louis XIV became the undisputed ruler of France.

When Louis XIV became ruler, his first priority was to prevent officials from abusing their power and to weed out corruption. Nicolas Fouquet (1615-1680), the Superintendent-General of Finance, was perhaps the most powerful minister during the first eighteen months of Louis s personal rule. With his vast palaces, Fouquet was arrested and disgraced in 1661. Louis XIV explained his motives and outlined the importance of his personal control of financial administration as, I should give serious attention to financial recovery and the first thing which I judged necessary was the removal of the principal officials who have caused chaos from their positions.

After Mazarin s death, Louis XIV assumed full power over the French government and illustrated it by refusing to appoint a chief minister. This represented the high point of centralized government: the king s ministers reported separately to him alone. He prized loyalty and efficiency in his ministers, making use of a body of able bureaucrats left to him by Mazarin. The Council of State was further streamlined. In the provinces, intendants were made fixtures, and they were flanked by sub-delegates acting under their orders. Efforts were made under Jean-Baptiste Colbert to produce national criminal, civil, and commercial codes. Municipal authorities were more closely supervised from above. Paris was put under a lieutenant-general of police, a minister-ranking appointment, whose job was to reduce crime and engage in urban development. The provinces were under a mounted national police constabulary. The spread of a network of poorhouses-cum-workhouses throughout the kingdom marked an important national poor-relief policy, and also formed an effective agency of social control.

However, France s economy had to expand and prosper in the longer term. Ways had to be found to ensure new wealth. Seventeenth-century France remained heavily dependant upon agricultural production. In his search for sustainable economic growth, Louis XIV and his able Superintendant of Finances, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, looked beyond agriculture to develop trade and industry.

Such attempts to encourage commercial growth faced obstacles of vested interests of individual merchants. To weed out this problem, Louis issued massive Commercial Ordinances to lay down in detail how business should be run. This series of regulations led to reforms of commercial courts. Louis not only sought to regulate trade, but individual growth as well. The intricacy and thoroughness of the government s requirements were enforced by an Inspector-General of Manufactures. Louis or Colbert personally oversaw specific problems in manufacturing industries. Louis set up extremely complex Revenue systems to tap the expanding wealth of French commerce and industry.

Because of his early brushes with the Frondes earlier in his life, Louis XIV always treated his nobility carefully. When he assumed complete control, he treated the