Louis XIV: 72 years on the throne, and what he never said

He was king before he could read. Born on 5 September 1638 after twenty-three years of waiting, which earned him the name Louis-Dieudonné, Louis the God-given, he lost his father in 1643: he was four and a half. His mother Anne of Austria held the regency; Mazarin, his godfather, gave him his political schooling. Then came the Fronde, from 1648 to 1653, which started in the Parlement and spread to the high nobility. The child felt humiliated by the great lords and unsafe in his own capital. He would remember.

Mazarin died on 9 March 1661. The king was twenty-two, and took the business in hand. He dated things from there himself: the first notebook of his Mémoires, at the BnF, is headed “Years 1661 and 1666”. He had fifty-four years of reigning left.

Until then it had never stopped: the Louvre, the Tuileries, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Fontainebleau, Versailles under construction. On 6 May 1682 it settled. The king was forty-three, the Hall of Mirrors had been a building site since 1678, and in 1685 more than thirty-six thousand workmen were at work on the estate.

Versailles is not a set, it is a device. Under the king’s eye the great lords no longer plot: they are with the armies or at Court, busy pleasing. Etiquette settles precedence. The rising and the going to bed are public: the king rises and sets like the star he took for his emblem. Apollo is everywhere, laurels, lyre, tripod, mixed in with the royal arms.

At his coronation he had sworn to defend the Catholic faith. He kept the oath against the Jansenists of Port-Royal, then against the Protestants: forced conversions, dragonnades. In October 1685 he suppressed the edict of toleration granted by Henri IV. The château de Versailles puts at two hundred thousand the Protestants who then left the kingdom: merchants, craftsmen, officers, gone to Holland, England and Prussia.

“L’État, c’est moi.” He did not say it. On 13 April 1655 he did hold a lit de justice at the Parlement of Paris, and the minutes kept his words: he forbade the magistrates to assemble over the edicts he had just brought. Nothing more. The phrase comes from elsewhere. Charles Duclos imagined it in his Mémoires secrets, published in 1791, without tying it to that session; it was Pierre-Édouard Lémontey who glued the two together in 1818, turning a memoirist’s “four words” into “four syllables”. What he is credited with on his deathbed says the opposite: he goes, the state remains. The historian Fanny Cosandey sums it up: the jurists took great pains to make it believed.

“Versailles ruined France.” The figure meant to prove it changes with every telling. Suspicious, because the spending was in fact counted. The Comptes des Bâtiments du roi record every payment from 1664 to 1715; Guiffrey published them in five volumes between 1881 and 1901, and they are on Gallica. Anyone who wants to put a number on the works opens those registers, and finds something other than marble in them. The Marly machine alone, which lifted water from the Seine up to the gardens, cost 3.5 million livres and eighteen hundred men. Finding water took thirty-two years.

“Ten thousand courtiers.” The figure is convenient, and it is not measured. Everything depends on whom you count (the lodged, the servants, the visitors of a day), and the estimates run from three thousand to ten thousand. The only serious count is that of the commissaire Pierre Narbonne, in 1722: about seven thousand people lodged at the king’s expense.

The king wrote, or rather had writing done. His Mémoires pass for his voice; the BnF credits them to three presumed authors: Louis XIV, Périgny, Pellisson. Pellisson’s manuscript carries at its head a formula that says everything: “Memoirs made under the eye of the late king”. This is not a diary, it is a lesson in government written for a successor.

The other series tells itself no stories. The Comptes des Bâtiments record the masonry, the fountains, the wages; the BnF holds the original registers of the first years, the Archives nationales the long run of fair-copy accounts, from 1668 to 1778. A building site can be read there line by line.

There remains the word stuck onto this reign. Absolutism is a notion historians still argue over. Some hold it a construction of jurists (Bodin, Cardin Le Bret) never applied as written, given how far the monarchy had to come to terms with the provinces and the corporate bodies. Others, following Roland Mousnier, see a real system that should be taken at its word. Fanny Cosandey proposes watching the monarchy at work on itself.