Louis XIVEverything you need to know about the Sun King (1638–1715).
Engraved portrait of Louis XIV by Robert Nanteuil
Robert Nanteuil, engraved portrait of Louis XIV (public domain; artist d. 1678).

Sayings

What Louis XIV actually said — verified verbatim, each with its source. The famous line he never said has its own labeled section below.

Editorial rule: a quotation appears here only if it is reported by a named contemporary source or a documented text. Everything else goes in Misattributed, with the evidence against it. See methodology.

Verified

“Every time that I fill a high office, I create a hundred discontented men and an ingrate.”

Toutes les fois que je donne une place vacante, je fais cent mécontents et un ingrat.

Source: Voltaire, Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751), ch. 26. Voltaire reports it as the king’s remark on appointments; he was writing within living memory of the reign and cites court tradition. This is the best-attested of the “maxims” attributed to Louis.

“The Pyrenees have ceased to exist.”

Il n’y a plus de Pyrénées.

Source: reported by Voltaire, Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751), ch. 28, as Louis’s remark when his grandson Philip, Duke of Anjou, became King of Spain (November 1700). Caveat: the exact phrasing is Voltaire’s report, not a court record; some accounts suggest the Spanish ambassador spoke first. Filed as verified-but-reported.

“I am going away, but the State will always remain.”

Je m’en vais, mais l’État demeurera toujours.

Source: Marquis de Dangeau, Mémoire sur la mort de Louis XIV (p. 24), the memoir Dangeau wrote on the king’s death. Spoken on the deathbed in the last days of August 1715. Note the contrast with the apocryphal line below: the dying king distinguished himself from the state he was leaving behind.

To his five-year-old heir (26 August 1715): “Do not follow the bad example I have set you.”

Ne suivez pas le mauvais exemple que je vous ai donné.

Source: reported in the Mémoires of the Duke of Saint-Simon and the Journal of the Marquis de Dangeau, entry for 26 August 1715. Both men describe the scene: the dying king had the little dauphin — his great-grandson, the future Louis XV — brought to his bedside and addressed him. The fuller wording varies slightly between accounts; the core sentence above is common to both reports. Saint-Simon records the king urging the child not to imitate his taste for war and building, and to be a peaceful prince who relieves his subjects.

Reported (single-source, secondhand)

“I could sooner reconcile all Europe than two women.”

Je mettrais plutôt toute l’Europe d’accord que deux femmes.

Source: reported in the Esprit de Mirabeau (v. 1, p. 246), a posthumous collection attributed to the Comte de Mirabeau — a century after the fact, and secondhand. Included here as reported, not verified.

Misattributed

“L’état, c’est moi.” — I am the state.

Almost certainly apocryphal. The sentence appears nowhere in the registers of the Parlement of Paris, where it was supposedly spoken on 13 April 1655. No contemporary source records it. The phrase’s origin is traced to Pierre-Édouard Lémontey’s Essai sur l’établissement monarchique de Louis XIV (1818), over a century after Louis’s death: Lémontey writes that “the Koran of France was contained in four syllables and Louis XIV pronounced them one day: ‘L’État, c’est moi!’” — a literary invention, not a quotation. As Olivier Chaline and Edmond Dziembowski observe, “if the forger is well forgotten today, his invention has not finished being used.” It is, fittingly, contradicted by Louis’s own documented deathbed words: “Je m’en vais, mais l’État demeurera toujours” — I go, but the State remains.

“J’ai failli attendre.” — I almost had to wait.

Said to have been addressed to a courtier who arrived late; regarded as apocryphal by E. Fournier, L’Esprit dans l’Histoire (4th ed., 1884), ch. xlviii. No contemporary source.

“Après moi, le déluge.” — After me, the flood.

Sometimes attached to Louis XIV; properly attributed to Louis XV (or, in some accounts, to Madame de Pompadour). Not his.

Source notes