Death of Louis XIV
Louis XIV died on 1 September 1715, four days short of his seventy-seventh birthday and in the seventy-third year of his reign. No European monarch has ruled longer. He had succeeded at four in 1643 and had governed personally since 1661, and almost nobody alive in France could remember another king. What he left was a state stronger than he had found it and a country exhausted. The wars of the last quarter-century — the League of Augsburg and the Spanish Succession — had cost enormous sums; the treasury was some two billion livres in debt against annual revenue of about 145 million; and the winter of 1709 had killed hundreds of thousands. His own family had gone before him. His son died in 1711, his eldest grandson and that grandson's wife and son within weeks of each other in 1712, and another grandson in 1714 — smallpox and measles — leaving a great-grandson of five. He told the child on his deathbed not to imitate him in his taste for building or in his love of war, and to try to keep peace with his neighbours. He also said, in the standard version, that he was departing but that the state would always remain. The Parlement of Paris set aside his will within days and gave the regency to his nephew Philippe d'Orléans, who moved the court out of Versailles to Paris. Crowds are reported to have cheered the funeral procession. The state he built lasted seventy-four years past him and was destroyed by the debts of the reigns that followed.
- Year: 1715 CE
- Category: Political
