Louis XIVEverything you need to know about the Sun King (1638–1715).
Hyacinthe Rigaud's 1701 state portrait of Louis XIV in coronation robes: blue velvet strewn with fleurs-de-lis, ermine, the regalia on a cushion
Hyacinthe Rigaud, Portrait of Louis XIV in coronation robes, 1701 (Musée du Louvre, INV 7492; public domain). The king was 63 — the legs famously idealized, the face lined: a state portrait, not a photograph.

Louis XIV of France

The Sun King — born 5 September 1638, died 1 September 1715, King of France and of Navarre from 14 May 1643. Seventy-two years on the throne, and the central figure of French classical civilization. Everything here is cited; uncertainty is labeled.

Louis-Dieudonné — “God-given Louis” — was born on 5 September 1638 at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, the long-awaited heir of Louis XIII and Anne of Austria. He was four years and eight months old when his father died on 14 May 1643 and he became king. He died on 1 September 1715 at Versailles, aged 76, after a reign of 72 years and 110 days — the longest verified reign of any European monarch in history.

His reign covers the whole arc of France’s 17th century: the regency of Anne of Austria and Cardinal Mazarin, the Fronde, the personal rule he seized in 1661 after Mazarin’s death, the building of Versailles, the wars of the 1660s–1710s, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), and the long twilight of the War of the Spanish Succession. This site treats him as a reference subject: what is documented, what is reported, and what is invented about him — kept strictly separate.

Start with: Start Here (the 10-minute overview) · Biography · Timeline · Sayings — and the famous sentence he almost certainly never said (see the misattributed section).

How this site is organized

A note on method

This site quotes Louis XIV only in words that are actually documented, dates only what the evidence dates, and marks everything else. The famous “L’état, c’est moi” — I am the state — appears nowhere in the registers of the Parlement and first surfaces in print decades after his death; it is filed under misattributed. His genuine deathbed words to his five-year-old heir were reported by witnesses who were in the room. See methodology for the full editorial policy.

Source notes