Louis XIV

Our latest entry in #EuropeanBios is #53, Louis 14 of France, also known as Louis The Great. Was he that great, really? I have read an extremely detailed account of his life and I'm not sold, but let's lay out the case.

Born in 1638, he was the 14th Louis. The very first Louis was Louis the Pious, son of our previous subject, Charlemagne. Charlemagne has a decent claim to creating the core of -- and the concept of -- Europe. Charlemagne? Pretty fucking great.

Nearly a thousand years before Louis 14, Louis 1 took Charlemagne's enormous empire and split it into two pieces, giving one to each of his sons. One half became (very roughly) France, and the other (even more approximately) Germany:

A thousand years later, the French had really got the hang of this "France" thing and the French nobility had got some really solid traditions going. Louis 14 was born into a system that knew exactly what it needed and demanded that he supply it. Surprisingly, he did.

If you're trying to run a country efficiently, selecting your supreme ruler by hoping one of his kids turns out to be good at the job is not a great system. France had tried alternatives (electing a king, having a huge civil war to decide who was king) and settled for heredity.

This already dicey system became even less likely to succeed when Louis missed the chance for on-the-job training when his dad died, making him king at the age of 4. This is a portrait of Louis around the time he became supreme ruler of 18 million people.

As was common for kings who were literal toddlers, a regent ruled for him. Louis' dad had left strict instructions about creating a council to run France and how and who should be on it and the very moment his body was cold his wife threw them away and appointed herself ruler.

Louis' mom, Queen Anne, was actually pretty good at ruling and did a solid job for eight years, although there was some unpleasantness involving wars, riots, famine and the royal family getting run out of Paris by an angry mob, standard French stuff.

Louis was a huge momma's boy and she had enormous influence over him the entire time he was alive, even after she was no longer running the country in his place. A great deal of Louis' policy decisions can be interpreted as trying to please and impress his mother.

At age 13 Louis was declared old enough to not need a regent any more, and instead ruled with a council that still included his mother and a very influential and competent administrator called Cardinal Mazarin, who despite looking like an evil Grand Vizier was mostly chill.

10 years passed. When Mazarin died in 1661, Louis was 23, and at that point Louis surprised everyone by deciding not to replace Mazarin as First Minister and instead rule directly. This was not considered a good idea, because heredity is not a good system, but it worked out.

At this point Louis was only 23 but had been king for 18 of those years. This early start and a long life is how Louis racked up a full 72 years of being king by the time he did, the longest reign of any monarch in history (we'll put that in the "great" column).

One of the most fun facts I learned about Louis is that he was an accomplished and enthusiastic ballet dancer (note how his dancer's legs are shown off in his portrait). He danced in 40 different ballets while king, and this wasn't considered inappropriate for a supreme ruler.

Louis was also aggressively, tiresomely heterosexual. He was just endlessly falling in love with, having kids with, and then getting tired of various women. He had 13 different long term mistresses; "Mistresses of Louis XIV" is its own category page on Wikipedia.

Louis' tendency when he was tired of a mistress was to pension her off by making her a duchess of some random part of France, to the point that "making a duchess" became a euphemism for him breaking up with someone. His love life is positively Shakespearean in its absurdity.

At one point to cover up his affair with his brother's wife, Henrietta, Louis pretended to be in love with her lady in waiting, Louise de La Vallière, but then actually fell in love with Louise, and so hid that affair by... pretending to have an affair with Henrietta. Absurd.

Meanwhile he was actually taking his job as king pretty seriously. He was enacting all sorts of dull but worthy reforms, enacting socialist policies to help the poor, and making France quite a bit larger by winning a bunch of wars. Very good, solid kinging, A+.

His other big claim to fame is that he created the palace of Versailles. This was partly for aesthetic reasons, partly for personal reasons (he did not like Paris), and partly for practical political reasons, which is that it gave him power over the nobility.

Prior to Louis the nobility were scattered all over the country in their own power bases, causing trouble. Louis gathered them all together at Versailles, where they were isolated and dependent on him for everything, which is how he wanted it. It was very effective.

Louis' reign went on and on until he finally died in 1715. His succession became a little complicated because in the last 4 years of Louis' life almost everyone in line for the throne died. Note all the deaths from 1711-1715.

Louis' son died, two of his grandsons died and one renounced the throne, and his elder great-grandson died. So his successor was his great-grandson who like him became king at the age of just 4. That's him in the dress, on a leash. Kids were raised different back then.

So, does all this add up to Louis being "the great"? He was good at war, he was good at governing, he didn't notably fuck anything up, he ruled for ages. But it just doesn't win me over. He was Louis the Mostly Very Good, But Not Terribly Impressive. But good job on Versailles.

P.S. I should add that Louis didn't dislike Paris for no reason; when he was 11 an angry mob had chased him out of the city, which traumatized him. He understandably never felt safe in Paris again. Plus he thought the Louvre was tacky.