| Notes |
- Mazarin dies, in 1661, he leaves a kingdom at peace, externally as
well as internally. The long war with Spain, conducted since 1635, has
ended in 1659 with the treaty of the Pyrenees. France makes useful
gains on both her borders with Spain, taking land from Flanders and
Luxembourg in the Spanish Netherlands and along the Pyrenees in the
south.
Under the treaty Louis XIV also marries the Spanish infanta Maria
Theresa (Marie Thérèse to the French). She brings a useful dowry of
500,000 crowns, but she renounces her rights to the Spanish crown.
(The renunciation is overlooked two generations later, when an
unexpected result of this marriage is a Bourbon prince on the throne
of Spain.)
Mazarin also leaves to Louis XIV his very talented deputy Colbert,
much as Mazarin himself was bequeathed to Louis XIII by Richelieu.
Colbert is entrusted with reform of the French economy, which he
carries out with great efficiency over the next twenty-two years. But
his relationship with the king differs from that of his predecessors.
Richelieu and Mazarin acted with almost complete authority as
principal minister, in a form of government which became known as the
ministériat.
After Mazarin's death Louis will have no more of that. He becomes
his own principal minister, directly controlling every aspect of state
policy. Colbert and other colleagues in government are merely the
king's loyal servants.
It is probable that Louis never said L'État c'est moi ("the State
is myself"), traditionally quoted as part of an address in 1655 to the
Paris parlement (the powers of which he subsequently restricts). But
even if apocryphal, the statement reflects Louis' concept of his
kingly role.
Moreover the state which he personifies is one which he strives
ceaselessly to make more powerful and more spectacular. His ambitions
are seen in the palace which he creates at Versailles from 1664, and
in the series of aggressive military campaigns with which he attempts
to enlarge France's borders. His great projects leave the kingdom
bankrupt at the end of a long reign. But in the scale of their
ambition they are magnificent.
In August 1661, five months after the death of Mazarin, Louis XIV
is the guest of honour at a festivity presented by Nicolas Fouquet -
the minister entrusted by Mazarin with the finance department. The
event takes place at the superb palace of Vaux-le-Vicomte, near Melun,
built by Fouquet over the previous five years as his personal
residence.
With Le Vau as the architect, Le Brun designing the interiors and
Le Nôtre in charge of the spectacular gardens, Vaux-le-Vicomte is one
of the great French baroque palaces. The king does not like what he
sees. Or rather he likes it very much indeed - but not in the hands of
one of his subjects.
Much as Hampton Court harmed Wolsey in the eyes of Henry VIII,
Vaux-le-Vicomte seals the fate of Fouquet. The palace itself, with the
lavishness of the entertainment, convinces the king that so much
wealth can only be ill-gotten. Fouquet is arrested in September and is
tried for embezzlement. Colbert plays a perfidious role in the
proceedings, suppressing all documents favourable to Fouquet's case
and thus safeguarding his own new role as finance minister.
Fouquet is sentenced to life imprisonment, while Louis goes one
stage better than Vaux-le-Vicomte on his own account. In 1664
Fouquet's architect, Le Vau, is commissioned to rebuild the royal
lodge at Versailles. Le Brun will do the interiors, and Le Nôtre the
gardens.
In his palace at Versailles, constructed between 1664 and 1710,
Louis XIV creates an architectural symbol of absolute rule. The vast
symmetrical building (sufficiently complete by 1682 to become the
permanent home of the French court) has at its centre a superb piece
of theatre - the great Galerie des Glaces (Hall of Mirrors), designed
in 1678 by Jules Hardouin-Mansart (the royal architect after the death
of Le Vau in 1670).
Here, where Louis sits in state to receive important visitors, the
mirrored walls reflect back and forth the splendour of the occasion.
On the ceiling above, as if in the heavens, paintings by Le Brun
remind the viewer of glorious moments in the king's life.
Some 3000 courtiers live at Versailles, jostling for the king's
attention and favours. Status, ever liable to change, is made starkly
visible in the details of court ritual. Every part of the king's day
is a performance - getting up (the lever), eating (the couvert), going
to bed (the coucher). To be allowed to watch him on any such occasion
is a privilege, to sit on a stool in his presence a high honour, to be
promoted to a chair almost unbearably exciting.
The regulations for those not in his presence constantly emphasize
his divine status. It is compulsory to bend the knee to a table laid
for the king's meal - and even to the royal chamber pot on its way to
be emptied.
Outside the building the great vistas of Le Nôtre's gardens develop
the same theme. Seen from the palace each perspective recedes towards
infinity, while the gardens become more natural with increasing
distance; seen from outside every path leads back towards the king at
the formal centre.
These vistas sparkle with light and water, as the many hundreds of
fountains designed by Le Nôtre play over sculptured groups praising
the king by various allegorial means. And finally - one of their most
important purposes - the gardens make the perfect setting for the
spectacular fêtes de Versailles, celebrating the greatness of France
and of Louis in pageant form.
While Louis himself is the star of France's grandest and
longest-running piece of theatre, he is also keenly interested in
performance of a more conventional sort.
He is lucky in being able to call on France's three greatest
dramatists, all working during his reign, Corneille, Racine and
Molière. But the type of theatre which most appeals to him is ballet.
At the age of twelve, in 1651, he dances five comic roles in a court
ballet (a Bacchante, a man of ice, a Titan, a Muse and a divine). Two
years later he appears as Apollo, wearing a glorious sun costume - an
early contribution to the cult of himself as the Sun King, which he
fosters throughout his reign.
The dancers in court ballets are the courtiers themselves, and a
large part of the pleasure comes from watching one's friends prance
about in spectacular costumes. The English diarist John Evelyn sees
Louis XIV dancing in Paris in 1651; he marvels not so much at the
dancing as at so many sumptously attired aristocrats.
But Louis XIV himself is genuinely interested in dancing, and in
1661 he decides that his colleagues are not up to scratch. He brings
together the best Parisian dancing masters to form the Académie Royale
de Danse, where his friends' skills may be honed. It is so successful
that he follows it in 1669 with a similar Académie Royale de Musique.
These two institutions are merged to form the Paris Opéra (still in
existence today). From 1672 professional dancers are trained. The
institution settles down into what is recognizably a ballet company.
The first director, Pierre Beauchamp, choreographs many ballet
sequences with music by Lully and others - and he devises his own
system for recording the steps. (He is often credited with inventing
the five classic positions for the feet, but more probably he is
merely the first to record them.)
Confronted by the challenge of the king's building plans, and
determined that every detail shall proclaim the majesty of his master,
Colbert sets up a royal factory to provide the furniture and soft
furnishings which will be needed.
He does this by buying in 1662 the Paris workshops of the Gobelin
family, in the Faubourg St Marcel. They are renamed the Manufacture
Royale des Meubles de la Couronne (Royal Factory of Crown Furniture).
In the following year Charles le Brun, now official painter to the
king, is made director of the new establishment.
Craftsmen are gathered from far and wide, raw materials are
brought in. The intention is that everything required by the king, and
luxury goods purchased by others in France, shall be made to very high
standards here or in similar establishments within the kingdom - and
that a surplus of such items will be available for sale abroad.
This is in keeping with mercantilism, the economic orthodoxy of the
17th and 18th centuries. The mercantile theory states that countries
grow rich by importing little and exporting much, thus storing up a
healthy balance of payments in the form of the gold which other
nations pay for the exported goods.
For this same purpose Colbert introduces standards for goods
manufactured in France (penalties include the pillory for shoddy
work); he improves internal transport, with major undertakings such as
the Canal du Midi; he builds up the merchant fleet so that precious
French funds are not spent on the carrying trade; he establishes
colonial enterprises (the East India and West India companies, both
founded in 1664) to ensure a supply of raw materials; and he erects
tariff barriers against imports.
Many of these measures are effective, though tariffs tend to
provoke the same in retaliation. But any lasting benefit from
Colbert's efforts is undermined by Louis XIV's military adventures.
From the moment of taking power into his own hands, in 1661, Louis
XIV bases his policy in all fields on one over-riding aim - to
increase the power and glory of France. In foreign affairs this
primarily means extending the kingdom's frontiers.
Louis sees his first chance when his father-in-law, Philip III of
Spain, dies in 1665. Disregarding the fact that his Spanish wife has
renounced her claim to the Spanish kingdom, Louis finds spurious legal
reasons to argue that parts of the Spanish Netherlands should devolve
to her. The resulting conflict, caused by French troops marching into
Spanish territory in 1667, is known therefore as the War of
Devolution.
France's two great warriors, Turenne and Condé, are once again to
the fore. Turenne seizes part of the Spanish Netherlands in 1667.
Early in 1668 Condé takes only two weeks to occupy the whole of
Franche-Comté. The peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1668 restores much of
the lost territory to Spain but nevertheless leaves France with
considerable gains in Flanders. Louis' great military engineer,
Sebastien de Vauban, immediately moves in to protect the new
acquisitions with state-of-the-art fortification.
This is a pattern which is regularly repeated. In 1672 Louis
launches a campaign against the United Provinces of the Netherlands,
which leads to a succession of wars ending only in the treaties of
Nijmegen in 1678-9.
The terms agreed at Nijmegen again bring Louis territory on his
borders at the expense of Spain (this time Franche-Comté is finally
ceded to France, having been returned to Spain in 1668).
During the 1680s Louis uses a more nibbling form of policy, in
which he claims to be effecting "reunion" between France and
territories once owing feudal allegiance to the French king. On this
basis he gradually strengthens the rather vague rights granted to
France in 1648 in Alsace and Lorraine. He seizes Strasbourg in 1681
and Luxembourg in 1684. By the treaty of Regensburg, in 1684, both are
ceded to France.
The aggressive tone of France's policy is reflected in other less
dramatic ways. Louis tries to insist on his ambassadors taking
precedence over all others in foreign courts; French ships are ordered
to abandon the conventional custom of saluting British ships in
British waters; there is a battle in the streets of Rome after a
dispute over precedence between the French ambassador's escort and the
papal guard.
Internally the same insistence upon the king's pre-eminence leads
to repression of any who disagree with Louis' preferred version of
Christianity.
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Abt 1625 - 1701 (76 years)