On April 23, 1648 Chancellor Séguier informed the Parlement
of Paris that Regent Queen Anne of Austria insisted the edicts
requiring more taxes must be implemented.
One week later the paulette tax was renewed
with a fee on four years of salaries.
A tax imposed on judicial officers stimulated the four law-courts
of Paris (Parlement, Grand Conseil, Chambre des Comptes,
and Cour des Aides) to form the Arrêt d’Union on May 13.
They sent representatives to meet in the Chambre Saint-Louis
in the Parlement to reform the bankrupt government.
Queen Anne as Regent accepted the Union on June 15,
and their assembly proposed 27 articles of reform.
They demanded that intendants and other officers of
tax collection be suppressed unless
they were authorized by courts of justice.
The sale of new offices was to be banned.
Royal interventions in the judicial process must cease.
Fiscal legislation must be registered by parlements.
On June 23 Anne attended local celebration of St. John’s Day,
and 9-year-old King Louis XIV
lit the bonfire before cheering crowds.
In July the Parlement of Paris demanded that contracts with
tax farmers must be revoked, and the taille tax
was to be decreased by a quarter.
Superintendent Particelli was resented for having acquired
much wealth, and he was dismissed on July 9 and replaced
by Charles de la Porte, Duke de la Meilleraye, who was
assisted by finance directors
Etienne d’Aligre and Antoine Barillon.
On July 18 all the intendants were suspended except those
with the army in frontier provinces,
and that day the taille was reduced by 12%.
Parlement still wanted 25%, and financiers refused
to make loans to the government.
On July 31 Queen Anne and her prime minister
Cardinal Mazarin renewed the paulette tax and stopped
demanding four years of income from magistrates.
In August the Parlement demanded the right to assess the
pancarte tariff, and they agreed to let it be assessed by
Pierre Broussel and Ferrand on their behalf
and by Prince Gaston d’Orléans for the Regent.
The critic Broussel began investigating the salt tax (gabelle)
and contracts with tax farmers,
and Parlement decided to prosecute financiers.
During a celebration of the French victory at Lens several men
including Broussel and President Nicolas Potier de Blancmesnil
were arrested on August 26.
Parlement met the next day, and 150 judges followed by
20,000 people marched to the Palais Royal to demand
that Queen Anne release Broussel and Blancmesnil.
People began building 1,260 barricades in Paris
and were joined by city militias.
Slings called frondes were used to throw rocks,
and these rebellions were called “Frondes.”
The barricades spread, and two days later Anne and
Mazarin with a letter de cachet ordered
Broussel, Blancmesnil and other magistrates released.
Also in 1648 the Royal Academy of Arts was founded in Paris.
Many began writing pamphlets that came to be called
“Mazarinades” criticizing Mazarin for being
corrupt, despotic, and a warmonger.
Most of those opposing Mazarin were organized by
Jean-François-Paul de Gondi de Retz, Archbishop of Paris.
Of the 5,000 pamphlets published in the next few years
only 600 supported Mazarin.
He was defended by Gabriel Naudé who published
the 700-page Mascurat which had little appeal.
Prince Louis II of Condé returned to Paris,
and he and Gaston met with delegates from Parlement.
On October 24 the Regent Anne decreed statutes confirming
the articles of the Union and conceding a 20% cut
in the taille tax, reductions of excise taxes on meat, wine,
and salt, and accepting that no official could be dismissed
or imprisoned by a lettre de cachet
without a trial within 24 hours.
She felt humiliated and left Paris with Mazarin on the night
of January 5-6, 1649 to go to nearby Saint-Germain-en-Laye.
Three days later the Parlement demanded that
Mazarin be banished, and Condé’s troops
surrounded Paris and put it under siege.
The price of flour rose sharply.
On January 18 aristocrats led by Gondi de Retz swore
to support Parlement against Mazarin.
In February the Prince of Condé’s brother
Armand de Bourbon, Prince of Conti, invited the
Archduke
Leopold to invade France from the Spanish Netherlands.
In 1648, 1649, and 1650 bad weather delayed grape harvests
until October, and the price of bread
was the highest in nearly a century.
In the spring of 1649 floods covered central Paris.
The French controlled Catalonia in the early 1650s
when the people were weakened by hunger and a plague.
The longest drought recorded in
Languedoc and Roussillon was in 1651.
France had bad harvests in 1646-51 and again in 1658-63.
News that England’s Charles I had been beheaded
on January 30, 1649 alarmed most of the Parlement,
and their President Mathieu Molé arranged talks
with the Regency at Rueil in March.
Their peace agreement was accepted
by the Parliament on April 1.
Interest payments had stopped in February, and most
financiers had departed;
but Particelli’s favorite traitant La Ralliere was imprisoned.
Any advances on taxes that
La Meilleraye could get he sent to the army.
The royal family returned to Paris on August 18,
and they were cheered by tens of thousands in the streets.
Yet the Fronde of Paris had spread to
Provence, Guyenne, and Bordeaux.
On December 11 rumors spread that France was going
to default on its bond payments, and riots broke out.
On the 22nd France’s procureur-général asked the
Parlement to prosecute Gondi de Retz, Beaufort,
and Broussel, but most of the evidence was hearsay.
Queen Anne and Mazarin made concessions to the
Prince of Condé, but then on January 18, 1650
they arrested him, his brother Conti, and his brother-in-law
Henri d’Orléans, Duke of Longueville.
The Duchess of Longueville organized support to remove
Mazarin while Marshal Turenne joined their cabal on April 30
and conspired with Spain.
Condé’s wife Claire-Clémence de Maillé-Brézé,
who was Richelieu’s niece, garnered support in Burgundy
and Berry where Condé was governor, and Conti’s wife
raised rebels in Champagne where he governed.
The Duchess of Longueville incited rebellion in Normandy.
Provence also joined them in what was becoming a civil war.
Turenne and Archduke Leopold’s Spanish forces
captured Chatelet in May and then Guise.
The Regency withdrew troops from forces fighting Spaniards
and regained control of Burgundy during the summer.
Anne and Mazarin went with the royal army which besieged
Bordeaux in July while Gaston ran the government.
They made peace on September 30, and Mazarin offered
amnesty while agreeing to dismiss
the hated governor, the Duke of Epernon.
D’Aligre warned that people were not paying taxes
in Touraine, Maine, and Anjou.
The government had to borrow
from traitants at high interest rates.
Turenne’s rebel army occupied Rethel,
but King Louis and Mazarin went with the army
that defeated them on December 15.
Archbishop Gondi de Retz persuaded Gaston, Broussel,
the Duchess of Chevreuse, and other aristocrats to demand
the dismissal of Mazarin, and in early February 1651
the Parlement of Paris called for the exile of Mazarin
who left Paris and went to Le Havre
where the princes were imprisoned.
He released them, went to Liege,
and found sanctuary in Cologne.
On February 9 Gaston with militia prevented
Anne and King Louis from leaving Paris.
Eight days later Parlement proclaimed
that no foreigner could be on the Royal Council.
On April 28 the Parlement exonerated Condé, Condi,
and Longueville, and they ordered Mazarin arrested.
Condé regained Burgundy and Berry
and gave Champagne to his brother Conti.
Mazarin sent letters advising Anne who listed charges
against Condé, including that his troops
were plundering Champagne and Picardy.
Condé argued his case before Parlement
which remained neutral.
Queen Anne made a deal with Archbishop Retz in early August.
If he would persuade Condé to be satisfied with what he had
or leave Paris, then she would have Retz nominated
to be France’s next cardinal.
On August 17 she announced the
King’s criminal charges against Condé.
Retz and Gaston had a strong party that opposed
Condé’s party in the Great Chamber.
When the Parlement of Paris met on the 21st, the leaders
of these parties were protected by hundreds of armed retainers.
On September 5, 1651 King Louis XIV celebrated his
13th birthday, and two days later the Parlement proclaimed
him of age to rule according to Salic law, ending the Regency.
The next day Molé was given the seals;
La Vieuville became Superintendent;
and Charles de l’Aubespine, Marquis de Chateauneuf,
was appointed chief minister.
Condé signed an agreement with Spain
in November to receive military and financial aid.
King Louis and Anne went with the royal army
to fight Condé in Guyenne.
Louis proclaimed him and his rebels guilty of treason.
La Rochelle remained loyal to the King,
but on September 22 Condé entered Bordeaux
and was supported by their Parlement.
Queen Anne left Paris on the 27th and moved to Poitiers.
Turenne returned to support the King in October.
The Parlement of Paris offered a reward of 150,000 livres
to whomever assassinated Mazarin
that would be paid for by selling his library.
Nobles in the countryside published
Eight Peasants from Eight Provinces calling for
an Estates General, allowing nobles in royal offices,
reducing lawyers and administrators, abolishing pensions
of great nobles, and taxing the wealthy.
On December 4, 1651 the Parlement of Paris
proclaimed Mazarin an enemy of the state.
He hired 6,000 German mercenaries
and returned to France on December 24.
On January 11, 1652 Louis XIV supported him and ordered
his subjects to assist Mazarin
who joined the royal family in Poitiers.
On the 24th Gaston d’Orléans allied with the Prince of Condé,
and the Duke of Rohan led an uprising in Anjou.
However, Turenne and Henri de Lorraine, Count d’Harcourt,
led royalist forces who captured Anjou
as Rohan surrendered on February 29.
Condé defeated Charles de Monchy, Marquis de Hocquincourt,
at Bléneau on April 1 and then returned to Paris while
Duke Charles IV of Lorraine invaded the northeast for Spain.
Mazarin paid off Lorraine who left France in June.
The court went to Saint Germain
as Paris became the scene of civil war.
On July 2 Condé’s forces fought a bloody battle against
royal troops led by Turenne in the
Faubourg Saint-Antoine east of Paris.
Two days later a mob burned down the town hall,
and a rump Parlement recognized Condé’s power in Paris.
D’Aligre reported that most of the hostility was aimed
at Mazarin, and on August 19 he went to Bouillon.
On September 23 city councilors asked d’Aligre
to arrange the surrender of Paris to Turenne,
and d’Aligre persuaded Gaston to leave Paris.
Condé fled to the Spanish Netherlands.
On October 21 King Louis entered Paris to cheering crowds,
and the next day he ordered Parlement
not to discuss affairs of state and its finances.
That month the French evacuated Casale in Montferrat.
A call to elect deputies to an Estates General
to meet at Sens was sent out in November.
Condé and Gaston wanted it in Paris,
but Queen Anne prevented that.
The result was that the Estates never met.
Mazarin was welcomed when he returned on February 3, 1653.
The Fronde rebellion continued in the southwest; but it ended
after the Prince of Conti’s surrender of Bordeaux on July 31
and the capitulation of Villeneuve-sur-Lot on August 13.
Of the five years of misery 1648-53, 1652 had been the worst.
One million people may have died during the Fronde revolts.
After they ended, the monarchy in France
would assert itself with more power.
Mazarin spent much time tutoring King Louis XIV on politics
so that he could learn to govern without
being controlled by a prime minister.
While the King and Mazarin were with the army fighting
the Spaniards at the sieges of Mouzon and Sainte-Menehould,
the diplomat Abel Servien and Nicolas Fouquet
were in charge of the administration.
They were assisted by Etienne d’Aligre
and Antoine Barillon in finance.
The Prince of Condé was in exile,
and Gaston d’Orléans had retired to Blois in 1652.
That year in October the Spaniards had
taken over the fortress at Casale in Italy.
They also captured Gravelines and Dunkirk in Flanders.
In July 1654 the Prince of Condé was a commander of
the Spanish and Lorraine troops which besieged Arras.
The French army led by Turenne relieved the city in August,
and the Spaniards retreated.
The French then took over Quesnoy.
In 1655 Turenne’s forces laid siege to Landrecies which
surrendered on July 14, and in the summer the French
captured other towns on the northern frontier.
The Duchesse de Chatillon tried to persuade the
Marquis d’Hocquincourt, who governed Péronne,
to turn it over to Condé, and Mazarin had her arrested.
In July 1656 Turenne besieged Valenciennes,
but Condé and Don Juan of Austria, who was governing
the Spanish Netherlands, stopped the French
advance there and at Cambrai in 1657.
Louis XIV had been crowned at Rheims on June 7, 1654.
He went to the Parlement of Paris on April 13, 1655
and ordered them not to discuss the edicts
they were there to register.
He made his famous statement,
“I am the state.” (L’état, c’est moi.)
However, he resented the Fronde rebellion of the privileged,
and his court would not return to Paris until 1660.
During the English Civil War in the 1640s the French princess
Henriette and her son Charles II had been given refuge in
France, and Mazarin let royalist English ships use French ports.
In 1654 Mazarin gave the exiled royal couple money to move
to Cologne, and in 1655 he negotiated a commercial treaty
with Oliver Cromwell that was signed at Westminster
in November, ending their trade embargoes
and attacks on each other’s ships.
In April 1656 the General Hospital of Paris
opened to house the poor.
On March 23, 1657 England and France
formed an alliance with the treaty of Paris.
The French army of 30,000 men besieged Montmédy
which held out with only 756 men for 57 days.
On June 14, 1658 Turenne’s French army defeated
Condé and the Spaniards on the dunes,
forcing Dunkirk to submit nine days later.
The French turned over the city to the English
as they had agreed in the treaty.
The French then took Bergues, Furnes, Gravelines,
Menin, and Ypres in Flanders.
Tax collectors returned to the provinces by 1653,
but instead of intendants they were called commissioners.
The Royal Council’s expenditures were 113 million livres
in 1653 and climbed to 154 million by 1657.
Between those years Angers had its
elections annulled three times.
Uprisings occurred in the southwest at Chalosse, Astarac,
Médoc, Libournais, Saintonge, and Auvergne.
In 1657 and 1658 nobles in Normandy assembled
and formulated a list of grievances to restore
their traditional rights and privileges.
These ideas spread to Anjou, Beauce, Tours, and Poitou.
In April 1658 a popular rebellion erupted in Sologne
where the peasants rioting were called “Sabotiers.”
French soldiers suppressed the rebellion,
and concessions were made on the taille tax.
France had an army of more than 200,000 men
on various frontiers.
On November 30, 1657 a royal decree required
subjects in Provence to pay soldiers.
When the governor, the Duke de Mercoeur,
imposed the charge on the towns of Tarascon and Draguignan
in February 1658, they resisted violently.
This spread the tax rebellion to Aix and Marseille
where merchants equipped a galley with a commander.
The King ordered them to accept the royal commander,
and in July troops faced barricades.
On August 14 French diplomats helped organize the
League of the Rhine which included more than fifty German
princes who allied with France, effectively separating
the Habsburg empires of Spain and Austria.
Emperor Ferdinand III hoped that one of his sons would
marry Felipe IV’s oldest daughter Maria Teresa,
but he died in 1657 and was succeeded by Leopold.
Mazarin wanted Louis XIV to marry her
and negotiated with Felipe.
The Spaniards and French signed a truce on May 7, 1659,
and on November 7 the war was ended
with the Peace of the Pyrenees.
France gained Roussillon and Perpignan in the south,
part of Luxembourg, and Artois, Arras, Béthune, Gravelines
and Thionville in Flanders.
England kept Dunkirk, and Duke Charles IV regained Lorraine.
Spain wanted Maria Teresa to renounce any claim to the
Spanish throne by her or her children, and they promised
to provide a dowry of 500,000 gold écus.
The French made the renunciation dependent on payment
of the dowry, and Spain, broke from wars, never paid.
On January 20, 1660 the Queen Mother Anne came
with 6,000 soldiers, and a tribunal in Aix ordered a citadel built.
King Louis arrived in Marseille on March 2,
and he announced changes to the city’s administration.
Mazarin also accomplished a diplomatic triumph by helping
to mediate the Peace of Oliva on May 3, 1660
that ended the Second Northern War between Sweden,
Poland-Lithuania, Austria, and Brandenburg-Prussia.
After a proxy marriage in Fuenterrabia, Louis and Maria Teresa
were wedded on June 9, 1660 in Saint-Jean-de-Luz.
Louis XIV and his bride entered Paris
in August 26 amid celebrations.
Mazarin had built a fabulous palace and accumulated
a large fortune that included the duchies
of Mayenne and Nevers with the abbey of Cluny.
His librarian Gabriel Naudé had acquired 40,000 volumes
by 1648, but the Parlement of Paris sold them in 1651.
However, after the Fronde revolt Naudé managed
to reconstitute most of the collection.
In 1658 Mazarin had allowed Finance Superintendent
Nicolas Fouquet to buy the Belle Isle fortress from
Cardinal de Retz so that it would not fall into the wrong hands.
Because Mazarin had benefited financially so much from his
service, he did not restrain Fouquet from doing the same.
In 1656 Fouquet had hired the architect Louis Le Vau to build
him an extravagant chateau and gardens at Vaux-le-Vicomte,
and 18,000 workers began the project in early 1657.
In declining health Mazarin urged King Louis
to rule without a chief minister.
Mazarin’s estate was worth nearly 40 million livres with
more than half of it in cash when he died on March 9, 1661.
In 1657 Paul Scarron completed his realistic novel,
Roman comique, and that year
Cyrano de Bergerac published his fantastic
Histoire Comique des Etats et Empires de la Lune.
In Paris in 1659 Pastorale by Abbe Pierre Perrin and
Robert Cambert was the first opera performed in French.
Vincent de Paul criticized the Jansenists for adopting the
Calvinist idea that only a small number of souls were
predestined for the grace of salvation;
he believed God gives all people the grace needed.
During the Fronde revolt Vincent advised Queen Anne to
separate herself from the hated Mazarin to restore civil peace;
but he felt he failed and left Paris to go on a tour
of his Mission’s provincial houses for five months.
While he was gone, 600 soldiers occupied
and plundered the buildings at Saint-Lazare.
In December 1650 seven priests and six brothers went to aid
the poor suffering from the war in Picardy and Champagne.
Charles Maignart published regularly Les Relations to report
on
the misery and the charitable work in the devastated provinces.
The collected letters were distributed in Paris and other cities.
On February 14, 1651 an ordinance appointed Vincent
secretary of state for the provinces affected by the wars,
and by March a public campaign had raised 80,000 livres
so that they could feed 10,000 people.
They also provided seeds and tools
for those strong enough to work.
Vincent sent a priest and five missionaries to Warsaw
in September and wrote the Queen that
they could educate priests in Poland by using Latin.
As he aged, Vincent de Paul suffered more from painful sores
on his legs and fevers which may have been caused
from contracting malaria when he was young.
He followed the instructions of physicians, but their purges
and bleedings only weakened the patient.
During the civil war the revenues of the Mission were reduced.
When the rebel forces of Gaston d’Orléans and the
Prince de Condé occupied Paris in 1652,
Vincent met with them and then advised
Queen Anne that Mazarin needed to leave.
Meanwhile at Saint-Lazare about 15,000 people a day
were given soup so they would not starve
while the Daughters of Charity helped feed another 19,000.
Many died of the plague, and missionaries
helped healthy men bury the dead.
Soldiers confiscated wheat from farmers.
On August 16 Vincent wrote to Pope Innocent X asking him
to intervene for peace, and two days later
Cardinal Mazarin withdrew from the court.
Vincent wrote to him on September 1 and begged him to let
the King and Queen return to Paris, and after the departure
of Gaston and Condé they did so on October 21.
After Mazarin came back in 1653, he had Vincent removed
from the Council of Conscience.
The Ladies of Charity raised money, and the Missionaries
helped them distribute aid to those in need.
That year Pope Innocent X also issued a bull
condemning the propositions of Cornelius Jansen.
In April 1656 a royal edict prohibited begging in Paris
which had an estimated 40,000 doing so.
They were to be housed at Salpetriere and other places,
and a hospital was established.
However, Vincent opposed physical constraint,
and involvement of the police resulted in
only 4,000 going into the general hospital.
Over seven years 360,000 livres were raised to help
the poor and the sick in Champagne and Picardy,
and they rescued 800 orphans.
Vincent kept working and wrote or dictated about
ten letters a day from Saint-Lazare to the priests, Louise,
and the Daughters of Charity.
Queen Anne donated 60,000 livres for a mission to Metz.
Vincent died on September 27, 1660, and René Alméras
was elected to succeed him as Superior General
of the Congregation of the Mission.
Vincent de Paul included the vow of stability in his Rule of the
Congregation so that members would not leave
after finishing their studies.
He succeeded in keeping the priests secular
rather than part of a religious order.
Vincent was concerned that the Church was being ruined
by bad priests, and he worked to educate and train
better priests by recommending action to do good.
The five virtues he recommended most were
simplicity, humility, gentleness, mortification, and zeal for souls.
Vincent believed that perfection comes
from doing the will of God.
Yet he realized that one must have an inner life,
or else one lacks everything.
After hearing of Mazarin’s death King Louis XIV summoned
Superintendent of Finances Nicolas Fouquet,
Secretary of State for War and the Navy Michel Le Tellier,
and Minister of State Hugues de Lionne and told them
that his full Council would meet the next day (March 10, 1661).
There Louis announced that he intended
to govern his state himself.
Chancellor Pierre Séguier and Fouquet would no longer be
authorized to decree any ordonnance de comptant
which had allowed them to make unauthorized payments
from the Treasury, and the Secretaries of State would not be
permitted to issue any papers including passports
or spending without his order.
The King assured them that they were free to offer him advice
and that he was eager to learn from their criticism.
The Council would meet on Mondays and Thursdays,
though for the rest of the month they met every day.
He warned the elder Brienne not to discuss foreign affairs
to anyone but to the King and his inner circle of
Séguier, Fouquet, Le Tellier, and de Lionne.
Louis learned from the Fronde revolt that he wanted to break
the power of the independent nobles, and so he had
no princes, aristocrats, marshals, or prelates on his Council,
excluding even his mother Anne who had been regent.
Louis began getting up before nine and worked three hours
before dinner and two after, consulting with ministers and
giving audiences, and he spent countless hours working alone.
He made himself accessible
and quickly learned more about government.
On March 11 he ordered the elder Brienne to write
to all French ambassadors and ministers.
On March 21 he initiated a search of all titles of nobility
because many were claiming them to avoid paying taxes.
On April 4 Louis abolished the tax
on drinks levied in Normandy.
He told Fouquet that his past corruption would be forgotten
but warned him it must end.
Jean Baptiste Colbert had been made an intendant on March 8.
The King designated him to control finances because
he considered him “hardworking, intelligent, and honest.”
Colbert had been educated by Jesuits, served in the war
ministry under Le Tellier, and in 1651 began managing
the large fortune accumulated by Cardinal Mazarin.
Louis XIV later wrote his memoirs of these years,
and he found that Fouquet continued making “excessive outlays,
fortifying his fortresses, building palaces, forming cabals,
and putting under his friends’ names important offices.”
He even tried to bribe the King’s mistress Louise de La Valliere
by offering her 20,000 pistoles.
Louis forced Fouquet to pay
the 30,000 écus he owed the crown,
and he did so by selling his office of procureur-général
of the Paris Parlement which allowed him a trial
by Parisian magistrates who were his friends.
Louis ordered the daughter of the Duchess of Orléans
to wed the Grand Duke of Tuscany’s heir
or become a nun even though
she was in love with someone else.
The King’s advisors were astonished by his sudden thoroughness.
Louis summoned Perier, who had persuaded the Aix Parlement
to resist the royal government.
When that Parlement refused to let him go,
the King’s Council (conseil d’en haut) had Perier arrested.
Louis also ordered the Aix Parlement president
to Paris or face imprisonment.
In May 1661 the King exiled his own relative,
the Comte de Soissons, for initiating a duel over two wives
even though Olympe Mancini was a former mistress of Louis.
The ban on dueling had not been enforced
since the time of Richelieu.
Louis realized in early May that he would have to remove
Fouquet; but he had to do so carefully because of his power
and so that his papers could be obtained.
Louis implied that Fouquet might be the next chancellor,
and he arranged to borrow two million livres
from the new Duc de Mazarin if necessary.
In early August he stopped Fouquet’s abilit
to take money from the Treasury.
On August 19 the King and his court attended an all-night party
at Fouquet’s palatial estate that included a performance of
Moliere’s Les Facheux with music by Lulli.
Six days later Louis ended
the use of ordonnances de comptant.
While the court was visiting Nantes on the King’s 23rd birthday
on September 5, royal guards were present.
The Musketeers commander D’Artagnan arrested Fouquet,
and all his papers were seized.
On November 15 a Chamber of Justice was organized
“to examine the abuses and malversation in finance since 1635,”
and the investigation took two years.
In November 1664 Fouquet was tried for peculation
and treason, and on December 20 the judges voted 13-9
for banishment over death,
but Louis modified the sentence to perpetual imprisonment
and sent most of the judges who voted for banishment into exile.
Fouquet was not allowed books nor writing materials
and he died in 1680.
Louis XIV created the Council of Finances
under his former tutor Nicolas de Villeroy.
Fouquet had wasted much money and made it worse
by borrowing at high interest rates.
As a result of the debts more than 16 million livres were lost
to the Treasury in 1662, but the 54 million livres revenue
for that year by 1664 had increased to 88.5 million.
Louis was so determined to balance his budgets that
he kept a notebook with a record of income and expenditures.
The summer of 1661 had a bad harvest,
and a severe famine followed.
Louis wanted to relieve the suffering of his people,
and in 1662 the tailles tax was reduced by three million livres.
Yet in 1664 France’s treasury had a surplus
of more than a half million livres.
Louis gave out pensions, titles, offices, and promotions
that been handled by prime ministers
since the death of Henri IV in 1610.
On November 1, 1661 Queen Marie-Thérèse had given birth
to a son Louis, assuring the succession.
In 1662 starving people in the Boulonnais rebelled.
Louis XIV sent 38 companies of royal troops who arrested
3,000 people of which 40 leaders were executed,
and 400 were made galley slaves for life.
Louis imposed censorship that limited the number of subversive
pamphlets to 1,500 during his reign (1661-1715).
In 1649 alone more mazarinades had been published.
Another revolt in Audijos lasted from 1663 to 1665.
The capable Colbert founded the Académie des Inscriptions
et des Belles-Lettres and the Academy of Painting and Sculpture
in 1663, and in September he sent out intendants to study
the communes and their defenses, cultivation, industry, and trade.
He became Superintendent of Buildings in 1664,
set up the Council of Commerce the same year,
and was recognized as Controller General in 1665,
the year he started the Académie des Beaux Arts,
followed by the Academy of Sciences in 1666
and the Paris Observatory in 1667.
He became secretary of state for the King’s
household in 1668 and for the navy in 1669.
That year he founded the Academy of Music and Dance
and in 1671 the Academy of Architecture.
Thus Colbert came to dominate supervision of finances
and also commerce, public works, police, the navy, colonies,
the arts, and the royal household.
During his career Colbert secured positions
for about twenty of his relatives.
On August 3, 1664 Colbert presented a report to the King
and the Council of Commerce with his recommendations for
using the policy of mercantilism to acquire gold and silver bullion
by protecting domestic industries from foreign competition.
He noted that France had less than 300 ships then
while in 1658 the Dutch had 16,000.
He urged the King to help increase the number
of their ships to 2,000 within ten years.
He argued that their manufacturing and other production
was mostly ruined because the Dutch had been bringing these
products to them in exchange for commodities.
If French factories produced more goods, they could sell them
to the Dutch or abroad to gain money.
Colbert calculated that the Dutch had been taking
four million livres annually from France
for transportation costs to carry French products.
Using French transportation would save that expense.
He blamed the poor condition of French commerce on debts of
cities, legal wrangles over debts, tolls on land and water,
ruined public roads, multiplicity of officials, excessive taxes on
commodities, excessive tolls at provincial and national borders,
piracy, and the inattention of the King and his Council.
He suggested that they could also increase their wealth
by limiting the consumption of imported goods.
He urged the King to welcome merchants at court,
protect them, and aid their commerce.
He advised renewing local regulations, lessening import
and export duties on manufactured products, investing
in factories, subsidizing ships, repairing public roads,
removing tolls, discharging local debts,
making rivers navigable, and supporting France’s
new East and West Indies Companies started in 1664.
Louis XIV believed that France had become the greatest
power in Europe, and he wanted his reign to achieve greatness
and glory by promoting justice, common sense,
compassion, and enlightenment.
Writers were given pensions and praised him.
Painters portrayed his rule,
and historians recorded his achievements.
Louis rewarded those who aided his efforts
and punished those who violated his laws.
He made his best advisors wealthy with gifts
for being honest and not corrupt.
The sun symbolized his power.
He endeavored to win wars, advance trade, promote the arts,
build palaces, take care of the nobles,
and help people to prosper.
Although he exercised nearly absolute power in making laws,
setting taxes, spending the money, and conducting foreign policy,
his purpose was to protect people’s rights as he saw them.
He could hire or fire any government employee,
and he selected abbots, bishops, and archbishops
who were always confirmed by the Pope.
Louis remembered the poverty of the court during the civil wars
when a mob had invaded his bedroom.
The Fronde rebellion had weakened
the power of the parlements.
They had become unpopular because they and other judges
were not elected but bought their offices.
France’s provinces had governors with large salaries
who were from the royal family or were aristocrats.
The Fronde had increased their power, but now
the intendants appointed by the King
regained authority to carry out his policies.
Governors and other aristocrats were encouraged to live
at the Fontainebleau court where they were lavishly entertained.
Unlike the King of Spain, who was rarely seen,
Louis liked to have people around him,
and he enjoyed their company in royal parks and palaces.
In 1662 a famous Carrousel was held in the space
between the Tuileries Palace and the Louvre.
Colbert assured Louis that such events would
increase the revenues from sales taxes.
Splendid fashions were noticed,
and witty conversation was appreciated.
Those who spent too much on clothes or lost a fortune
gambling might gain a pension or an office with a salary.
The court was also filled with beautiful women from the
two queens to the young maids-in-waiting.
The King’s brother Duke Philippe d’Orléans had recently
married tall Henrietta Stuart,
and they were called Monsieur and Madame.
Next were the Prince and Princess de Condé and the
Duke of Beaufort who had led the aristocrats during the Fronde.
While still attending to conjugal duties with Queen
Marie-Thérèse, Louis fell in love with Louise de La Vallière
who bore him three sons who all had died by 1666.
She also gave birth to his daughter Marie-Anne de Bourbon
(1666-1739) and the son Louis de Bourbon (1667-83).
The Queen and his former mistress, the Comtesse de Soissons,
came to accept La Vallière.
Le Brun decorated the Tuileries Palace,
and Le Notre was the garden architect.
In 1660 Versailles was only a hunting lodge; but 834,000 livres
were spent on improving the gardens
and building the palace in 1664 alone.
In May 1664 the Festival of the Pleasures of the Enchanted Isle
inspired by Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso
was held in the gardens of Versailles.
Louis began writing memoirs of his rule for the benefit
of the Dauphin, but they were not published until 1806.
Louis believed his greatest pleasure was governing rationally
and raising men of merit to do good.
He found that the most successful are those
who have the magnanimity to admit their faults.
He felt he could gain respect by doing justice
to everyone’s claims, and he gave favors to whom he pleased.
He used a wide choice of people to help him
rather than a prime minister.
After being shy he came to realize he was born to be a king,
and he found satisfaction in working
for the happiness of the people.
He learned as much as he could about the provinces
and foreign relations which he kept secret.
Louis believed in submitting to God and hoped that
his subjects would obey him as God’s representative.
In religion he respected the Edict of Nantes,
but he disliked Protestants and Jansenists, who believed that
salvation comes from God’s grace, not works.
France was mostly Catholic with 12% Protestants.
These Huguenots had been disarmed
but were allowed to practice their faith.
In April 1665 Louis imposed on the French the papal bull
Regiminis apostolici that required all clerics to condemn
the five propositions from Augustinus by Cornelius Jansen.
At first Louis XIV excelled at diplomacy, though he often used
the threat of force.
In October 1661 a dispute over precedence in London
between Spain and France was resolved after Louis wrote
a letter to Charles II demanding that
the Spanish ambassador be recalled.
In March 1662 Felipe IV’s envoy, the Count of Fuentes,
told the French court that
Spain would yield precedence to France.
In October 1662 Louis negotiated with Charles II and for
3.5 million livres he bought Dunkirk which he then fortified.
On August 20, 1662 during a conflict in the French embassy’s
district in Rome the Corsican Guards besieged the embassy
and shot pistols at the French ambassador, the Duke of Créqui.
Louis withdrew Créqui and asked about reparations,
and the Papal Nuncio was expelled
from France by the end of the year.
In January 1663 Pope Alexander VII offered to restore Castro,
Ronciglione, and Commachio to their dukes
but did not apologize.
The Parlement of Aix annexed Avignon with the
Comtat Venaissin, and Louis mobilized an army near the Alps.
On January 19, 1664 Alexander agreed to return Castro
and Ronciglione to the Duke of Parma and compensate
the Duke of Modena for Commachio,
and Rome’s governor Mario Chigi was dismissed.
After agreement to the Treaty of Pisa on February 12
the Pope’s nephew, Cardinal Chigi, came to France
and apologized on July 29,
and France returned Avignon to the Pope.
In September 1665 Louis sent the solicitor-general
and magistrates from the Paris Parlement to enforce
the law at Clermont in Auvergne, resulting in 87 nobles
being condemned with 23 of them executed.
Queen Mother Anne suffered several surgeries for breast cancer
before dying on January 20, 1666.
Although she had given up power in 1661,
Louis and his brother Philippe were close
to their mother and mourned her passing.
Louis was concerned that his brother might follow the bad
example of his uncle Gaston d’Orléans
who had been the focal point of plots.
Louis would not appoint princes as governors
so that he could keep them at court.
In 1666 the Parlement of Paris protested a new production tax,
a fine on financiers who had stolen from the Treasury with
Fouquet, and a reduction of interest on debt to 5%;
but after King Louis forbade the protest
and ordered them to register the laws, they submitted.
Louis made La Valliere a duchess and recognized
their daughter Marie-Anne.
He had numerous lovers and in 1666 fell in love with
Françoise-Athénaïs, Marquise de Montespan,
who though married was beautiful and intelligent.
King Felipe IV of Spain died on September 17, 1665.
Louis XIV’s wife Marie-Thérèse was his oldest child,
but Spain had not paid the enormous dowry of 500,000 écus.
Lawyers argued that she should inherit Flanders, Brabant,
Luxembourg, and the Franche-Comté,
and Louis decided that these territories belonged to France.
On May 8, 1667 he sent A Treatise upon the Rights of the
Most Christian Queen to Various States in the Spanish
Monarchy to Spain’s government explaining
how these territories “devolved” to his wife.
France hired 25,000 mercenaries from Switzerland, Germany,
Italy, and Lorraine, building up the French army to 80,000 men.
The War of Devolution began on May 24
as Marshall Turenne and the main army invaded Flanders.
The Spanish army in the Netherlands had only 20,000 men.
In August the French with short sieges captured Bergues, Ath,
Charleroi, Tournai, Douai, Oudenarde, and Alost.
The siege of Lille began on August 28,
and Louis arrived on September 10.
After a French attack on the 25th Lille surrendered the next day,
and 2,500 troops from the garrison
were allowed to march to Ypres.
Louis directed his engineer Vauban to build a fortress.
In 1667 François de Lisola wrote a tract accusing Louis XIV
of seeking a “universal monarchy,” and Emperor Leopold
made Lisola his ambassador to Spain.
On April 20, 1667 King Louis demanded that the Parlement
of Paris register a revised ordinance of civil procedure
without debate, and he had four magistrates
who disagreed exiled with three losing their offices.
By November he had it pushed through the parlements of
Burgundy, Dijon, Rouen, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Aix, Metz,
Rennes, and Grenoble.
Louis took the Marquise de Montespan as his mistress
and had her husband held in the Bastille.
During a short truce in January 1668 the Dutch, English,
and Swedes formed the Triple Alliance and urged Spain
to accept France’s claims; but they were prepared
to stop any future French aggression.
Louis went to war again in February.
War Minister Michel Le Tellier for years had been training
his son François, Marquis de Louvois,
and he supervised army supplies in Flanders.
Louvois suggested a plan to take French-speaking
Franche-Comté back from the Spaniards after several
generations, and the Prince de Condé led this successful
campaign that took only twenty days.
Peace was made again on April 15, and the French agreed
to withdraw from Franche-Comté after disarming it.
The peace treaty mediated by Pope Clement IX
was signed at Aix-la-Chapelle on May 2.
On August 13, 1669 Louis entered the Parlement of Paris
with Swiss Guards and forced them to register 25 new laws
The Turkish ambassador introduced drinking coffee to the
French court, and they noticed it kept them awake.
In July 1670 the Parlement of Rouen sentenced a man
and two women to be hanged for sorcery based on the
testimony of youths, but Colbert intervened to prevent that
and to release twenty others imprisoned on similar charges.
In August the Paris Parlement refused to publish new
criminal laws until the King sent them
a threatening letter the next day.
Louis made Paris an open city
by ordering its ramparts demolished.
Abbot Gabriel Mouton measured the circumference
of the Earth with decimal measurement in 1670.
That year Louis XIV founded a home for 7,000 disabled
soldiers, and France spent 16 million livres on the army,
9.5 million on the navy, 5 million on buildings, and 2.5 million
to fortify the newly acquired cities in the north.
On June 1 Louis made the secret Treaty of Dover with
England’s Charles II who agreed to convert to Catholicism
in exchange for two million livres and 6,000 French soldiers
to help put down rebellion.
If Charles supported a French war against the Dutch,
he would get annual subsidies of three million livres.
Also in 1670 French forces occupied Lorraine,
and Louvois introduced army uniforms.
By 1671 the King’s net income had doubled since 1661.
In November 1671 Emperor Leopold promised
to be neutral in a Franco-Dutch war.
Madame Montespan’s first pregnancy was kept secret,
and she had seven children by Louis XIV.
Louis Auguste (1670-1736) became Duke of Maine;
Louise Françoise (1673-1743) married Prince Louis III
of Condé; Françoise Marie (1677-1749) married the future
regent, Duke Philippe II of Orléans; and Louis
Alexandre (1678-1737) became Count of Toulouse.
Her other three children did not reach adulthood.
On April 6, 1672 France declared war on the Dutch
and mobilized their forces in May.
On June 12 King Louis, the Prince of Condé,
and the French army crossed the Rhine River.
The Dutch army had only about 40,000 men mostly in garrisons;
Willem of Orange commanded a force of 14,000.
On June 20 Utrecht surrendered.
French forces reached Amsterdam a few days later,
but they opened the sluices to flood their fields.
When Willem paid a small ransom,
Louis released 20,000 prisoners.
In 1672 the black plague killed 60,000 people in Lyons.
In February 1673 the Parlement lost
the right to object to royal edicts.
From the summer of 1672 to May 1673 the army led by
Turenne with 25,000 foot soldiers and 18,000 horsemen
fought Germans along the Rhine and the Elector of Brandenburg
who accepted a peace at Vassem on June 6.
In 1673 three French armies were led by Condé, Turenne,
and the King’s brother Philippe.
Louis joined that army of 45,000 men and 58 cannons
at the siege of Maastricht on June 10.
The garrison surrendered on July 1.
In late August the Austrian Empire and Spain
formed an alliance with the Dutch to reduce France
to the borders agreed upon in 1659.
Spain declared war on France on October 16,
and three days later France countered.
Taxes were increased to pay for the war,
and in the winter people began to rebel against them.
The Prince of Condé commanded an army against
Willem of Orange in the Netherlands
while Louis led a force to reconquer Franche-Comté.
They besieged Besançon for nine days until it capitulated,
and France annexed the territory.
In February 1674 England and Holland made a separate peace,
and on May 28 the Imperial Diet declared war on France.
Condé led an army of 45,000
and attacked Seneffe on August 11,
killing about 11,000 Dutch, wounding 7,000,
and capturing 1,000
while suffering about 8,000 casualties.
Tax rebellions erupted in Roussillon in 1674
and Brittany in 1675.
General Raimundo Montecucculli led an imperial army that
attacked Alsace, but the French led by Marshal Turenne
fought back and defeated the imperial forces
at Turckheim on January 5, 1675.
The French occupied Messina on the island of Sicily in April.
French forces crossed the Rhine again,
but Turenne was killed by a cannonball on July 27.
Charles IV of Lorraine died on September 18.
That year the Prince of Condé and Montecucculli retired.
On June 16, 1676 Louis XIV decreed that a general hospital
was to be established in every city of his kingdom,
but these institutions were more judicial than medical
in which the directors used stakes, irons, prisons,
and dungeons to control the insane.
In the next three years the French armies
achieved some victories.
In 1676 Louis mobilized five armies and led a force
of 50,000 men into the Spanish Netherlands.
Willem with 40,000 soldiers besieged Maastricht on July 7,
but after a failed assault on August 26 he lifted the siege.
Louis sent a fleet to Sicily.
On April 11, 1677 French led by the King’s brother
Monsieur Philippe defeated the Dutch led by Willem
at Mont-Cassel, capturing gold plate and his military plans.
The Monsieur was often mocked at court for dressing and
wearing make-up like a woman and desiring men,
and he was in love with the chevalier de Lorraine.
On April 21, 1678 Bishop Bossuet condemned
Richard Simon’s Critical History of the Old Testament,
and the Royal Council had all 1,300 copies destroyed.
Peace talks began at Nijmegen in May 1677.
Louis XIV captured Ghent and Ypres in March 1678
but proposed peace on April 9 by offering Maastricht
and other conquests while demanding much of Flanders,
Franche-Comté, management of Strasbourg,
and the right to move his troops through Lorraine.
The Dutch agreed to these conditions at Nijmegen on August 10.
Four days later Willem near St. Denis attacked a French force
led by the Duke of Luxembourg, killing about 2,000 on each side.
Spain and France signed a treaty on September 19,
and
Emperor Leopold finally accepted peace on February 6, 1679.
While their enemies reduced their armies,
France maintained their forces.
Louis persuaded the nobles to agree to a ban on dueling.
In 1680 he used a pension to win over the Bishop of Strasbourg.
While becoming fat Madame de Montespan remained
at court as the King’s official mistress.
Louis often visited Madame de Ludres; then it was
Mlle. de Fontange for a while until he fell in love with
Montespan’s protégée Françoise d'Aubigné, the Marquise
de Maintenon, a widow who raised
and taught the King’s legitimized children.
Though over forty she still was beautiful,
and Louis appreciated her intellect, modesty, and discretion.
By 1677 life at court had changed.
Many gambled, and a few wanted to remove their fathers
so that they could get their inheritance.
The Marquise de Brinvilliers took the chemist Saint-Croix
as a lover, and he gave her an arsenic powder
to poison her father and husband.
She took care of the sick,
and many of her patients died within a few weeks.
She found that small doses could bring about a slow
death that appeared to be sickness.
When Saint Croix was found dead after a laboratory accident,
she was suspected of poisoning people
and was arrested, tried, and executed.
In 1679 several people were suspected of being poisoners,
sorcerers, and abortionists, and were convicted.
On April 10 King Louis set up a special tribunal that
investigated 442 aristocratic men and women;
377 were arrested; 36 were condemned to death;
5 were made galley slaves;
and 23 were banished while others fled.
A year later a poisoner’s daughter accused Montespan
of giving Louis love potions, celebrating black masses
to regain his love, and ordering him poisoned.
Louis kept this case secret. Mlle. de Fontange
had a miscarriage in 1680, and she died the next year.
Louis XIV made a defensive alliance
with Brandenburg on January 11, 1681.
He created the Chambers of Réunion with thirteen members of
the Metz Parlement who determined territories in or near Metz,
Toul, Verdun, and Alsace, which had
belonged to France but had been lost.
Then he re-appropriated them,
mostly from small German princes, but on September 30
he included the imperial city of Strasbourg.
The French besieged Luxemburg until 1682.
That year the Benedictine monk Jean Mabillon published
De re diplomatica, and Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet
published his Discourse on Universal History to show how
God through the Judeo-Christian religion
has helped civilization advance.
On November 1, 1682 Bossuet gave an inaugural address
on the unity of the Church to a general assembly
of French clergy that included 34 bishops
and 37 other prelates gathered at Paris.
Louis expelled the Jews of Marseilles from France,
and the next year he banished Jews from the colonies
of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Cayenne.
Colbert also wanted to reduce the number of Jews
and their influence on the French economy.
In May 1682 the royal court officially
moved to the Palace of Versailles.
Building was continuing at Marly, and its expenditures
reached a peak with 677,000 livres in 1685.
The King’s most trusted minister Colbert
died on September 6, 1683,
and his son Seignelai took over most of his offices.
Le Pelletier became Controller General of Finances.
The War Minister Louvois became most prominent
and gained the job of Superintendent of Buildings.
Louis was becoming more religious
and shared that interest with Maintenon.
In 1682 he declared four articles which included
limiting the Church to spiritual matters, recognizing that kings
and sovereigns are independent from ecclesiastical power
in temporal matters, and that their subjects
owe them submission and obedience.
After that Pope Innocent XI no longer ratified Louis XIV’s
appointments to vacant sees,
but all the French bishops sided with the King.
Louis tried to destroy female vice by punishing prostitutes
with whipping or imprisonment
and by hanging abortionists as murderers.
He once praised a general for having 800 prostitutes
thrown from a high bridge into a river.
Homosexual men were punished for sodomy.
In 1680 Huguenots had been excluded from judicial
and financial offices, and mixed-religion marriages were banned.
In 1681 Louis had signed an ordinance that excepted recent
converts from the obligation to quarter dragoons;
but when he learned about it, he stopped that.
Instead lawsuits were used to persuade
the minority to turn Catholic.
In June 1681 a royal decree permitted children as young
as seven to convert even over their parents’ objection.
Protestant houses and churches were closed so that
the government could confiscate their endowments.
By 1682 France gained 88 new seminaries in the previous
forty years, mostly in the 1660s and 1670s.
During the summer of 1682 the government demolished
two or three Protestant “temples’ each week.
Louvois exaggerated how many Protestants were converting.
Philippe de Courcillon, Marquis de Dangeau, was
a devoted courtier, and in 1684 he started keeping
a diary describing the details of the King’s life.
In 1690 Louis de Rouvroy, Duc de Saint-Simon,
began doing so also.
Louis married Maintenon secretly in January 1684.
Because he trusted her discretion, he consulted his ministers
in her apartment, though he rarely followed her advice.
The Languedoc Canal connected the Atlantic Ocean and the
Gulf of Gascony to the Mediterranean Sea
and was opened to traffic in May 1683.
That year Louis XIV took advantage of the Turks’ invasion
of Austria to attack the Spanish Netherlands again,
besieging Luxemburg.
Spain declared war on France in December.
The French besieged Luxemburg from April 7, 1684 to June 7.
In May their ships bombarded Genoa and destroyed two-thirds
of the city because they had built ships and supplied Spain.
The Dutch persuaded the Spaniards to accept a 20-year truce
at Ratisbon on August 15 that gave Strasbourg, Luxemburg,
and other Reunion territories to France,
which conceded Courtrai and Dixmude to Spain.
In 1685 French entrepreneurs formed the
Guinea Company to exploit the expanding slave trade.
In May the Doge of Genoa visited
the court of Louis XIV to apologize.
On September 1, 1686 a Siamese embassy was received
by Louis at Versailles which was completed in 1688.
In 1685 Dragonnades harassed and intimidated so many
Protestants that during that summer 130,000 converted
in Bordeaux, Limoges, Montauban, and Poitiers.
In October the dragoons entered
northern France,
especially Normandy.
On October 19 Louis abrogated the Edict of Nantes with this
Edict of Fontainebleau which ordered Protestant churches
destroyed and their ministers to leave France within two weeks,
and all babies had to be baptized as Catholics.
The persecution in the southwest provinces
where about 300,000 Protestants lived included torture
and murder, and many fled to Brandenburg
where the Elector welcomed them.
This edict was popular among the majority Catholics.
On November 27 the French armed forces expelled
all Protestants, and the army and navy lost hundreds
of Huguenot officers and thousands of soldiers and sailors.
In October 1685 the pregnant Dauphine waited to leave
a play until the King left, and she had
a miscarriage before reaching her bed.
That year Louis began noticing pain in his feet,
and he suffered from poor dental care.
In 1686 he was ill with a tumor
on his upper leg and an anal fistula.
He kept working because he would not trust his brother
or his son Louis, the Dauphin.
He had engaged in wars, and his policies
were becoming more harsh and intolerant.
Expenditures on fortifications 1662-68 had averaged
2.3 million lives a year,
but in 1682-88 they had risen to 8 million.
In April 1686 French forces attacked Protestants in Vaudois,
devastating the country, and many of the 12,000 people
imprisoned died of starvation and disease.
Concerned about the expanding hegemony of Louis XIV,
Willem III of Orange organized the League of Augsburg
with his Dutch Republic, the Austrian Empire, German princes,
Britain, Spain, Portugal, and Sweden
in 1686 to defend the Palatinate.
In 1687 the engineer Vauban estimated that nearly one-tenth
of the French people had been reduced to begging,
and many more were in bad shape
because of debts and lawsuits.
In 1688 Louis also gave refuge at the Saint-Germain palace
to the exiled James II and his wife Mary of Modena,
giving her 240,000 livres
and promising him 600,000 livres a year.
War Minister Louvois believed a religious civil war would
break out in England and urged the King
to attack the Emperor as well.
Louis believed that his brother’s wife Madame should inherit
the Palatinate from her late father
because all her dowry had not been paid.
Yet she had renounced the claim
when she married Monsieur Philippe.
On September 24 Louis sent a letter to Emperor Leopold
giving him three months to comply.
Louvois persuaded Louis to besiege Philippsburg,
and on October 30 a French army led by the Dauphin and
Marshal de Duras with the
engineer Vauban captured the town.
By November 11 Mainz, Heidelberg,
and Mannheim were taken, and by the 15th Speier, Trier,
Worms, and Oppenheim had surrendered.
When Louis learned that cities had been burned,
he was angry and stopped that.
Brandenburg and other German states
went to war against the French.
The Dutch declared war on November 26,
followed by the Imperial Diet on January 24, 1689.
On December 20 Louvois marked cities on a map for
destruction, and Louis only objected to some religious buildings.
In the spring of 1689 people in the Palatinate rose up
and were led by Duke Charles V of Lorraine
whose state had been annexed by France.
His forces regained Mainz in June and Bonn in November.
On July 25 Louis XIV declared war on Britain,
and he mobilized 300,000 soldiers and ordered the silver
furniture from Versailles melted down
to make coins worth 2.5 million livres.
New gilt-wood furniture would set the fashion in Europe.
Louis provided a fleet to help James II invade Ireland.
On July 1, 1690 the Prince of Waldeck and an army of 38,000
allies near Fleurus were defeated by 35,000 French under
Marshal Luxembourg, who refused to deal with Louvois
and took his orders from King Louis.
On July 10 the French Navy defeated the Anglo-Dutch allies
near Beachy Head, but the next day William III’s 35,000
English and Dutch supported by exiled French Protestants
defeated James and 23,000 Irish and French at Boyne.
James returned to France.
Lavish balls and long parties were held at Versailles with 9,000
masked dancers carousing until four in the morning.
Waldeck and the Brandenburg elector
led a combined army of 55,000 in August.
After the death of Colbert’s son, the Marquis de Seignelai,
on November 3 Louis put the Count of Pontchartrain
in charge of the Navy.
In 1691 Louis XIV sent five armies to Flanders, the Moselle,
the Rhine, Piedmont, and Roussillon.
Louvois died in July but was replaced by his son
Louis François Marie Le Tellier, the Marquis Barbezieux,
who neglected his work while pursuing pleasures.
Louis complained but tolerated
his incompetence until his death in 1701.
In 1692 Louis added another army in Flanders
which besieged Namur on May 25.
On the 30th a fleet attempting to return James II to his throne
was defeated by the British Navy.
Louis made his natural sons the Duke of Maine Grand Master
of the Artillery and the Count of Toulouse Grand Admiral
Between 1650 and 1692 Louis had participated in more than
twenty sieges, but after this he asked his heir to campaign
for him, warning him that if he did not,
he would be despised and would lose respect.
In 1693 the French army was increased
to more than 400,000 men.
That year Louis XIV revoked his four religious articles,
and Pope Innocent XII ratified all the bishops
he had appointed since 1682.
On July 29, 1693 Luxembourg’s army of 80,000 men at
Neerwinden surprised William’s 50,000 who lost
19,000 soldiers while the French had 9,000 casualties.
At Marsaglia on October 4 the French army of 40,000 led by
Nicolas Catinat defeated Vittorio Amedeo of Savoy’s 36,000
who lost nearly 10,000 compared
to about 3,000 French casualties.
Starting in the summer of 1693 and lasting a year,
the French suffered one of their worst famines ever.
Economic regulations kept food out of districts
suffering famine while speculators cornered grain supplies.
In May 1694 Marshal Jules de Noailles with 20,000 infantry
and 6,000 cavalry invaded Catalonia
and took Palamos on June 10.
King Louis negotiated a neutrality treaty
to stop fighting in the western Pyrenees.
He imposed a new income tax of 5% that for the first time
included the nobles, setting a new standard of equality.
Marshal Luxembourg died on January 4, 1695
and was replaced by the Duke of Maine and Villeroy.
Armies led by Brandenburg and William III besieged Namur
on July 1 with 80,000 men, and the garrison gave up
and marched out on September 5.
Then the allies began invading French territory.
Between 1689 and 1695 the sale of offices
by parlements in France raised 16,740,000 livres.
In a treaty signed at Turin on August 29, 1696
Duke Vittorio Amedeo II, who ruled Savoy and Piedmont,
suggested that his daughter Marie Adélaïde could marry
the Dauphin’s son, the Duke of Burgundy.
She came to Versailles and delighted Louis and Maintenon,
and on her 12th birthday, December 6, 1697,
she married 14-year-old Louis of Burgundy.
In April 1697 the Commedia dell’Arte was ordered
to leave France because their play
The False Prude satirized Maintenon.
A French army of 40,000 men led by
Catinat and Villeroi besieged Ath on May 15.
William III arrived, and joined by Bavaria’s forces
they had 100,000 allies between Ath and Brussels,
but the garrison capitulated on June 7.
The French bombarded Barcelona in July,
and the garrison surrendered on August 10.
Louis XIV, William III, and Spain finally ended the
Nine Years War at Ryswick on September 20, 1697.
Louis promised not to try to restore the Stuarts,
gave back Lorraine, withdrew from Catalonia,
gave Brisach, Kehl, Freiburg, and Philippsburg
to the Emperor, destroyed his forts on the Rhine,
and recognized William’s principality
of Orange in southern France.
During the war the French had captured
or sunk more than 5,000 English merchant ships.
On January 29, 1699 Louis established
the rules for the Academy of Sciences.
On October 2, 1700 Spain’s Carlos II declared the Dauphin’s
second son, the Duke of Anjou, his heir and successor as the
grandson of his half-sister Marie-Thérèse, the late wife of
Louis XIV; but he stipulated that if the French did not accept
the will or if Philippe did not renounce the throne of France,
then his inheritance would go to the
Habsburg Emperor’s son Charles.
After the death of Carlos on November 1 Louis met with his
councils for many hours,
and they agreed to accept the terms of the will.
Nearly 17 years old, Philippe would become King Felipe V.
William III and the Dutch Grand Pensionary
recognized him in February 1701.
Then Louis announced that Philippe had not renounced the
throne of France, and he persuaded the new Spanish
government to give the French Guinea Company a monopoly
on the slave traffic to the Spanish colonies.
In March the Elector of Bavaria, who was governing the
Spanish Netherlands, recognized Felipe V.
In the spring Emperor Leopold’s imperial army began
attacking Spanish domains in Italy, and on September 7
England and the Dutch Republic formed the
Second Grand Alliance against France and Spain
which was joined by several German princes.
Louis instructed Felipe V to get advice from the French
ambassador, the Duke of Harcourt, who was already in Madrid.
Louis persuaded Philippe to marry Marie Adélaïde’s younger
sister, Maria Luisa of Savoy,
and their wedding was on September 11.
Louis chose as her main confidant (Camarera Mayor) the
princess of the Urchins, a widow of 59 and a close friend
of Madame de Maintenon who now
was an influential advisor to Louis.
Controller General Chamillart had recently become War
Minister as well, and the King took on more of that work.
He gave commands to his sons, the Duke of Maine
and the Count of Toulouse.
After his brother Philippe died, Louis was surrounded by
younger generations except for Maintenon,
who hated the war and wanted peace.
Felipe V became obsessed with sex so much that his young
queen could easily get him to agree with her,
though Louis advised him to make his wife obey him.
James II died on September 16, and Louis went against
the advice of most of his ministers and recognized
his son as King James III of England.
Prince Eugene of Savoy defeated French forces led by Catinat
in Italy, and on February 1, 1702 his army
killed General Villeroy and took Cremona.
On May 15 Britain, the Dutch Republic,
and the Austrian Empire declared war against France.
In September an Anglo-Dutch fleet overwhelmed the Spanish
silver fleet and a small French squadron in Vigo Bay.
On October 14 the French led by Villars were victorious
at Fridlingen in Alsace, but on the 23rd Liege capitulated
to the army led by John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough.
On March 9, 1703 Villars and the French captured Kehl
on the Rhine opposite Strasbourg,
giving the French a bridgehead.
Two days later the Elector of Bavaria with 12,000 men
defeated the imperial army of 10,000 at Seigharding,
and they took Ratisbon in April.
The Archbishop of Cologne fled to France before Bonn was
besieged and capitulated on May 15 to the Allies;
but on June 30 Boufflers led 19,000 French who defeated
an Anglo-Dutch force of 15,000 at Eeckeren.
In September the French defeated
the imperial army at Hochstedt.
On March 15, 1704 the Camisards, who were persecuted
Protestants led by Jean Cavalier, defeated the royal army;
but on April 16 the Marquis de Montrevel’s forces killed
about 400 Camisards as they
defeated a band of a thousand at Nagés.
Three days later 200 more Camisards were killed near Euzet,
and their weapons cache was captured.
The Marquis de Villars replaced Montrevel
as Governor of Languedoc.
Camisards met with Cavalier on May 6,
and they agreed to submit to the mercy of the King.
On July 2, 1704 the allies defeated the French at Donauwroth
as they regained the Lower Rhine.
The English took control of Gibraltar on August 3,
and forces led by the Duke of Marlborough
won a major victory near Blenheim on August 13.
The French and Bavarians had
12,000 men killed and 14,000 captured.
In March 1705 the British Navy drove the French away
from the Spanish coasts and took over Barcelona.
Emperor Leopold had recognized his son Archduke Charles
as King of Spain before he died in May,
but Charles III ruled only in Catalonia for six years.
On August 16 Vendome’s French force of 22,000 troops
defeated 24,000 commanded by Prince Eugene
at Cassano west of Milan.
In 1706 France’s budget had increased to 220 million livres
with a deficit of nearly 170 million.
French offices were sold; gold coins were debased;
paper money was introduced; taxes increased;
and loans depended on higher interest.
On May 23 Marlborough and the allies near Ramilles defeated
Villeroy’s army again, killing or wounding 13,000 French,
Bavarians, and Spaniards while losing
only 1,100 killed and 2,600 wounded.
In the next two weeks the allies captured Louvain, Brussels,
Malines, Lierre, Ghent, Alost, Damme,
Oudenarde, Bruges, and Antwerp.
Louis replaced Villeroy by recalling Vendome from Italy.
On September 7 Eugene and Vittorio Amadeo of Savoy
with 30,000 men outside of Turin defeated 41,000 led by
Orléans and Feuillade whose men suffered
3,800 casualties with 6,000 taken as prisoners.
The French retreated from Mantua, Milan, and Piedmont,
and the British Navy helped the Austrians take over Naples.
The French siege of Barcelona failed,
and Felipe V fled to Navarre.
The French Protestant exile de Ruvigny had become the
Earl of Galloway and led an invasion of Spain
and reached Madrid on June 26.
Maria Luisa managed to raise money from Spanish cities,
and Felipe led a revived army to defeat Galloway
and take back Madrid on September 26.
On April 25, 1707 Marshal Berwick’s French army of 21,000
defeated 16,000 English and Portuguese at Almansa,
inflicting 4,000 casualties and taking 3,000 prisoners.
Louis XIV gave his nephew, the Duke of Orléans, a command,
and he led a force that took Lerida
and other fortresses in Spain.
In August the Duke of Savoy besieged
Toulon and devastated Provence.
Vauban’s Dime Royal criticized France’s tax exemptions
and asked for uniform taxes, but Louis XIV
and the Royal Council ordered the books burned.
In March 1708 a fleet carrying 6,000 French and Jacobites
tried to invade Scotland, but after seeing Admiral Byng’s fleet
at the Firth of Forth they returned to Dunkirk.
Vendome surprised Ghent in early July and also seized Bruges.
The Duke of Burgundy and Vendome could not agree on their
command, and on July 11 Marlborough’s army of 80,000
defeated their 85,000 men at Oudenarde.
Prince Eugene besieged Lille on August 14 and captured
the town on October 22, which cost them 12,000 casualties,
but then they took Gand, Bruges,
and other strongholds in Flanders.
The winter of 1709 was one of the coldest ever in western
Europe as 24,000 people died in Paris in January.
Louis sent his gold tableware to the Mint to make coins.
His Foreign Minister Torcy went to The Hague on May 22 to
plead for peace, but the allies made severe demands including
that Felipe V give up the crown or be attacked by the French.
Louis refused to fight his kin.
Marlborough with an army of 86,000 men besieged Mons,
and on September 11 Marshal Villars and 75,000 French
engaged in the battle of Malplaquet that was the bloodiest
of Louis XIV’s wars with the allies losing 21,000 killed
and wounded and the French 11,000 casualties
while 500 soldiers were captured.
On February 15, 1710 Louis XIV’s great-grandson
Louis the Beloved was born.
In June the French lost Douai and Béthune.
Felipe V’s army was defeated in August, but on December
a Franco-Spanish army led by Louis and Vendome
did better against the allies at Villaviciosa.
France increased the annual income tax to one-tenth.
On April 17, 1711 Emperor Joseph I died
and was succeeded by Charles VI.
Marlborough’s army took Bouchain in September
and moved toward Paris, but the British wanted peace.
In January 1712 a peace conference began at Utrecht,
and they agreed on a cease-fire.
Felipe V renounced any claim to the French throne on July 8,
and on the 19th Louis gave Dunkirk to the British army.
Yet Prince Eugene continued to fight
and besieged Marchiennes on July 30.
Marshal Villars led a force that defeated them near Denain
and then took back Marchiennes,
Douai, Le Quesnoy, and Bouchain.
Louis XIV was sustained by the love of his wife Maintenon
until his death as important relatives died before him.
First on April 14, 1711 his only legitimate son,
the Grand Dauphin Louis, died of smallpox,
probably the most devastating blow.
This made his oldest legitimate grandson Louis,
Duke of Burgundy (Bourgogne), the Dauphin.
His other legitimate grandson, King Felipe V of Spain,
was 27 but still respected aging Louis enough
to give him power to act in his name.
Their brother Charles, the Duke of Berry, was uneducated
and was considered stupid,
and he died after a riding accident in May 1714.
In February 1712 the new Dauphine Marie Adélaïde
caught the measles and scarlet fever that was an
epidemic in Paris, and she and her husband, the new Dauphin,
succumbed to this disease within two weeks.
Then their five-year-old son Louis, Duke of Brittany (Bretagne)
died of measles on March 8.
This left their other two-year-old son as the heir to the throne.
Though many feared he might die also,
he lived to reign as Louis XV until 1774.
Historians believe that his governess, Madame de Ventadour,
probably saved his life by keeping doctors away from him.
The common practices of purging and bleeding of royalty
and aristocrats usually made them worse, and surgery,
painful without anesthetics,
was often deadly without antiseptic care.
People began to wonder if someone, such as the
Duke of Orléans, was poisoning people;
but doctors found no traces of poison,
and Louis trusted his nephew.
He increased the status of Montespan’s sons,
the Duke of Maine and the Count of Toulouse
until they were equal to royal princes,
but they were not in the line of succession.
Felipe V had renounced his claim to the French crown,
and on March 15, 1713 the dukes of Berry and Orléans
declared they had no right to Spain’s throne.
By April the Peace of Utrecht treaties had been signed by
Spain, Britain, France, Portugal, Savoy, and the Dutch Republic.
Felipe V was confirmed as King of Spain and their colonies,
and the Elector of Bavaria was reinstated.
Emperor Charles VI gained the Spanish Netherlands,
though its fortresses were garrisoned by the Dutch.
The Habsburg Empire also got Naples, Sardinia,
and most of Milan’s duchy while the Duke of Savoy
took over Sicily and the rest of Milan.
Spain ceded Gibraltar and Minorca to the British
and also gave them the monopoly on the slave trade
to Spanish colonies in America.
France recognized the British succession to the Hanovers
and let the English have Newfoundland, Rupert’s Land,
Arcadia in Nova Scotia, and St. Kitts.
France got back Lille and Béthune but destroyed Dunkirk.
The nations also made commercial treaties.
In the summer the imperial armies continued to fight,
but the French led by Villars often defeated them.
On March 7, 1714 they signed the Treaty of Rastatt
ending the War of the Spanish Succession.
Emperor Charles VI gave up the Catalans.
On September 7 the Treaty of Baden settled issues
between France and the Habsburg Empire.
After a four-month siege Barcelona surrendered
to the Bourbon rulers on September 11.
During the war from 1702 to 1714 French fleets
took 4,545 ships to prize courts.
During the reign of Louis XIV expenditures related
to war were 42% of the state budget in the 1660s,
66% in the 1670s, and 78% from 1690 to 1715.
Soldiers and peasants suffered most during the war,
and France compiled a huge debt that
reached £124,000,000 in 1715
compared to Britain’s £36,200,000.
Some made profits on loans, military supplies,
and manufacturing.
The era of Louis the Sun King built elegant palaces
decorated with paintings and sculptures that included
nudes, tapestries, mirrors, furniture, vases, etc.
In June 1715 an expedition of French
and Spaniards took back Majorca.
Louis XIV wrote his will on August 26,
suggesting a Regency Council, though he knew
he would have no power after his death.
On that day he said goodbye to his family,
and according to Dangeau’s Journal (XVI, 126)
he gave his great grandson Louis the following advice:
Sweet child, you are about to be a great King,
but your whole happiness will depend on
your submission to God,
and on the care you take to relieve the people of their burden.
In order to do this you must, whenever you can,
avoid making war; it is the ruin of the people.
Do not follow the bad example I have given you on this point.
Often I have started wars without sufficient cause
and continued them to satisfy my pride.
Do not imitate me, be a peaceful ruler,
and let your main object be to look after your subjects.
Take advantage of the education
Mme. La duchesse de Ventadour is giving you.
By 1714 France’s colony in western Haiti
was producing 7,000 tonnes of sugar.
In his last two years his physician Fagon gave Louis XIV
a diet of over-ripe fruit and sweets, and he probably suffered
from diabetes that led to the gangrene in his leg
that finally killed him on September 1, 1715.
Abbé Charles-Irénée Castel de Saint-Pierre (1658-1743)
was educated at a Jesuit college, where he studied the classics,
logic, ethics, physics, mathematics, and metaphysics.
He joined a strict order of monks,
but he had to leave it for reasons of health.
He moved to Paris in 1680 and was at court from 1693
to 1718, when he was expelled from the French Academy
for refusing to approve of the title “Great” for Louis XIV.
He studied both the theory and practice of politics and was
particularly influenced by Plato, Bodin, Machiavelli, Grotius,
Pufendorf, Richelieu, Doria, and Hobbes.
His Paix Perpetuelle was first published in 1712,
but he expanded that sketch to a two-volume edition
the next year, which was translated into English in 1714 as
A Project for Settling an Everlasting Peace in Europe.
He added a third volume in 1717 and published
abridgements in 1729 and 1738.
Saint-Pierre tried to gain publicity for his effort by giving credit
to France’s king Henri IV for the “grand design” that was
actually written by the Duke of Sully years later in 1638.
He attended the peace conference at Utrecht in 1713
as the secretary for the Abbé Polignac,
one of the three French plenipotentiaries.
This gave him first-hand experience of the peacemaking
process and stimulated him to work on his plan
that could make peace perpetual.
Saint-Pierre attempted to use the philosophical
methodology of Descartes in order to gain certainty
by means of intuition and deduction.
His first idea had been to include all the nations of the world;
but then he limited his confederation to Europe
so that the whole project would not seem impossible.
Examining the various means which could prevent war
among European nations, he inferred that
a federation of states is the best solution.
Whereas Hobbes showed that for the protection
and benefit of individuals there must be unity in the state,
Saint-Pierre went a step further in reasoning that to safeguard
the peace between nations there must be a unifying federation.
Saint-Pierre recognized that passions control the actions
of most people, and he argued that to overcome motives
of self-interest the fear of violence
must be used to enforce law and justice.
He believed that society could protect people from violence
by a contract and could express its sovereign will by
establishing a permanent federation among the states of Europe.
Saint-Pierre’s plan took the form of an elaborate treaty
divided into articles that were fundamental, important, and useful.
States of various forms of government could be in the federation,
and most at this time were monarchies.
The laws founded on justice were to be
equal and reciprocal for all.
Saint-Pierre pointed to the confederations of German
and Helvetian states and the United Provinces of the
Netherlands to show the practical advantages of union.
He began his plan with peace and contrasted this
to the French war aims that would have
initiated the biased plan of Sully.
Saint-Pierre proposed twelve fundamental articles.
First, all the Christian sovereigns of Europe shall form a
permanent union for peace and security, endeavoring also
to make treaties with Muslim sovereigns, and the sovereigns
are to be represented by deputies
in a perpetual senate in a free city.
Second, the European society shall not interfere with the
governments except to preserve them from seditious rebellions,
and he even went so far as to guarantee hereditary sovereignties.
Third, the Union shall send commissioners to investigate
conspiracies and revolts and may send troops
to punish the guilty according to the laws.
Fourth, territories shall remain as they are unless three-fourths
of the Union votes for a change, and no treaties may be made
without the “advice and consent” of the Union.
Fifth, no sovereign shall possess more than one state.
Sixth, Spain and France shall remain in the house of Bourbon.
These previous five articles have been criticized
for not allowing a natural process of change.
Seventh, chambers of commerce shall be maintained,
and each sovereign must suppress robbers and pirates
or pay reparation; if necessary
the Union may assist them in this.
Eighth, no sovereign shall take up arms except against
a declared enemy of the European society.
Complaints shall be discussed and mediated
by the senate in the city of peace.
The Union shall defend the sovereigns
who agree with its decisions.
After at least fourteen nations have joined the confederation,
any sovereign refusing to join is to be declared an enemy
by the rest of Europe, which is to make war on it
until the state joins or is dispossessed.
The ninth article specified that the senate was to represent
with one delegate each of the following 24 powers:
France, Spain, England, Holland, Savoy, Portugal, Bavaria,
Venice, Genoa, Florence, Switzerland, Lorraine, Sweden,
Denmark, Poland, the Papal States, Muscovy, Austria,
Courland, Prussia, Saxony, Palatine, Hanover,
and ecclesiastical electors.
Obviously this scheme allowed extra votes
for the divided German and Italian states.
Tenth, each state shall contribute to the expenses
of the society in proportion to its revenues.
Eleventh, the senate shall take up questions
after a plurality vote, and three-fourths is needed for a decision.
Twelfth, none of the fundamental articles may be altered
except by a unanimous vote of all members.
In the important articles Saint-Pierre gave more details
he recommended such as Utrecht as the seat of the senate,
which shall have an ambassador
in every province of two million people.
No sovereign shall keep more than 6,000 soldiers in his nation.
Enemies of the union shall be punished with death
or life imprisonment, and anyone reporting
a conspiracy shall be given a reward.
Every year on the same day sovereigns
shall renew their oath to the Union.
If a state has no succeeding sovereign, the Union may
regulate the succession or allow a republic to be formed.
The useful articles are even more specific.
The commander-in-chief of the federal forces shall not belong
to any sovereign family.
Rotating senators shall preside week by week.
The four standing committees on politics, diplomacy, finances,
and war are to be supplemented by committees of reconciliation,
which shall adjust difficulties
or report them
to the senators for their decision.
Freedom of religion is allowed.
The Union may agree on weights, measures, and coins.
The senate may mediate between conflicts of non-members
and support the sovereign who accepts its offer.
The European Union shall encourage Asia
to establish a permanent society also.