Louis XIVEverything you need to know about the Sun King (1638–1715).
Equestrian portrait of Louis XIV, after Charles Le Brun
Equestrian portrait of Louis XIV, after Charles Le Brun (public domain).

Reign & Works

"I will be my own first minister." What that meant in practice: the machinery of the longest reign in European history.

On 9 March 1661, with Mazarin dead, Louis told his assembled ministers that he would henceforth be his own first minister, and that nothing of importance should be decided without his orders. He kept that pattern for fifty-four years: daily council meetings, ministers who reported to him directly, and a written record of decisions. The machinery he built outlived him by generations.

The council and the ministers

Louis governed through three councils, above all the Conseil d’en haut (the High Council), which he attended in person and where foreign policy and the great decisions were taken. The secretaries of state — Colbert, Louvois, Le Tellier, Torcy, Chamillart — were creatures of the king, dismissible at will. No first minister ever again held Mazarin’s place.

Key ministers:

In the provinces the king’s will ran through the intendants — royal commissioners of justice, police, and finance, revocable at will — who steadily displaced the old provincial governors.

Finance: Colbert’s system

Colbert found the treasury ruined and rebuilt it: the taille was regularized, tax farming reformed, the budget balanced for a few years in the late 1660s, and state-sponsored manufactures (the Gobelins tapestry works, Saint-Gobain glass, the merchant marine) were built up. His doctrine — later called mercantilism or Colbertism — held that the state’s wealth was measured in bullion and favorable trade balances. It worked until the wars ate it: by 1715 the debt was enormous, the currency manipulated, and the peasantry crushed by taxation. See Colbert and the finances.

The army

Under Le Tellier and Louvois the French army grew into a standing professional force — by the 1670s the largest in Europe, with standardized drill, the bayonet, and a formidable artillery. Generals like Condé, Turenne, and later Villars won the battles; the wars are covered in the Dutch War and the Spanish Succession.

Religion: “one king, one law, one faith”

Louis’s religious policy hardened across the reign: the dragonnades (from 1681) quartered troops on Huguenot households to force conversions, and the Edict of Fontainebleau (18 October 1685) revoked the Edict of Nantes entirely. Protestant worship was outlawed, ministers were exiled, and children were to be raised Catholic. Some 200,000 or more Huguenots emigrated — a wound to the French economy and a gift to France’s enemies. The Camisard revolt (1702–1705) in the Cévennes was the violent aftershock.

With Rome, Louis fought for the liberties of the Gallican church: the Declaration of the Clergy of France (1682) asserted four Gallican articles limiting papal power. He accepted the papal bull Unigenitus (1713) against Jansenism only on his own terms, at the end of his life.

Law and administration

The great ordinances — civil procedure (1667), criminal procedure (1670), waters and forests (1669), commerce (1673), the marine (1681) — systematized royal justice and administration. The Code Louis gave the monarchy a legal uniformity France had never had.

Patronage: the cultural program

Louis founded or refounded the institutions of French classical culture: the Académie des inscriptions (1663), the Académie des sciences (1666), the Observatory of Paris (1667), the Académie royale de musique (the Opéra, 1669), the Comédie-Française (1680). Molière, Racine, Lully, Le Brun, Perrault, Mansart, and Le Nôtre worked under his patronage; French became the language of European courts. The program was political as much as aesthetic: culture as an instrument of glory. See art and propaganda.

Source notes