Louis XIV
Louis XIV reigned for seventy-two years, longer than any other European monarch, and made his court the model for the continent. He was four when he succeeded in 1643, and the formative experience of his life was the Fronde — five years of aristocratic and parlementaire revolt in which the boy king was moved between palaces at night, was once found asleep by a mob that entered his bedroom to check he had not fled, and learned that Paris and the nobility were dangerous. Mazarin governed until 1661, and Louis announced on the cardinal's death that he would take the government himself and appoint no first minister, which astonished a court that expected another. He then governed for fifty-four years, working several hours a day with a small council of men chosen for competence rather than birth — Colbert on the finances, Louvois on the army, Vauban on the fortresses. The nobility was neutralised by being brought to Versailles and given ceremony instead of power. The wars ran almost continuously: Devolution, the Dutch War, the Nine Years' War, and finally the Spanish Succession, which put his grandson on the Spanish throne and left France bankrupt. He revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and drove out perhaps 200,000 Protestants. The sun was his emblem and the state's identification with his person was the point of the whole design. He outlived his son, grandson and eldest great-grandson, and left the throne in 1715 to a boy of five. The sentence about the state being himself is almost certainly not his, and his recorded deathbed remark to the child is: that he had loved war too much, and should not be imitated in it. France was some two billion livres in debt and the reckoning came in 1789.
- Lived: 1638 CE – 1715 CE
- Nationality: French
- Roles: king, ruler, military_leader
