Louis XIV Assumes Personal Rule
Cardinal Mazarin died on 9 March 1661, and Louis XIV told his ministers the next morning that he would govern without a first minister. He was twenty-two, had been king since he was four, and had spent his minority under Mazarin and his mother Anne of Austria while the Fronde — a series of noble and parlementaire revolts from 1648 — twice drove the court out of Paris. He had been dragged from bed by a mob checking he had not fled, and he never forgot it. The system he built answered that experience directly. He governed through a small council of professional administrators drawn from the legal and mercantile classes rather than the great nobility — Colbert, Le Tellier, Louvois — men who owed everything to him and could be dismissed. The nobility was given Versailles instead of power: a court where precedence, the right to hand the king his shirt, and attendance itself were the currency, and where a man not present was a man not favoured. Nicolas Fouquet, the superintendent of finances, gave a party at Vaux-le-Vicomte that August that was more magnificent than anything the king owned. He was arrested three weeks later, tried, and imprisoned for life, and his architect, painter and gardener were set to work at Versailles. Louis reigned seventy-two years, longer than any European monarch, revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and fought wars that left France exhausted. The state he made outlasted him by seventy-four years and was destroyed by the debts of the ones that followed. Versailles is what most people mean by absolutism.
- Year: 1661 CE
- Category: Political
