Louis XIV as One of the Most Famous Monarchs of French History - Essay Example

Louis XIV was one of the most famous monarchs of French history and under his rule France went on to become a dominating power in Europe. He was an absolute monarch and his long tenure was basically stabilised due to a variety of reasons,not the least of which was his ability to manipulate the nobility.Nobility under Louis was reduced in power due to a variety of explicit and implicit measures he took, and began to largely depend on his favour for their continued sustenance. In order to understand his attitudes towards the nobles, it is important to understand an extent of his background before he decided in 1662, at the young age of twenty-three, to assume all responsibility of ruling France on his own, thus breaking from the tradition of his immediate predecessors. Also important was his concept of himself which enabled him to rule by Divine right, and the philosophies of the time that supported his notions. Louis was five years old when he sat on the throne with the regency of Cardinal Jules Mazarin, against whom the nobles and the Paris Parlement (a powerful law court), rose in 1648 at the beginning of the long civil war known as the Fronde.In the course of this war, Louis suffered humiliation,poverty, misfortune, fear, cold, and hunger, because he had to often leave his place in Paris and go into hiding for his own safety.These early experiences led him to have a lifelong mistrust in the nobility, they taught him that the nobility was one of the greatest threats to a French king and inspired him to set about implementing his absolutist concepts. Being a devout Catholic, he had no trouble in imagining that he was an agent ordained by God himself to rule the kingdom and made great efforts to cultivate an image for himself that was based on myth and legend, as well as on reason and political legitimacy. Louis chose the sun as his personal emblem, signifying that he was the source of all benevolence in the kingdom and that the entire world, including the nobles, revolved around him, and he soon came to be known across all Europe as the "Sun King". "On June 5th, 1662, a procession of monkeys, bears, nobles, and slaves, spiralled through the streets of Paris in celebration of the glory of Louis XIV. ......the king was represented as the serene and uncontested master of the world; each noble carried a shield bearing a device which affirmed his absolute subjugation to Louis Dieu-donne figured as the sun." (Lynn, 1998) Louis' concept received further legitimacy in his status as agent of God in the work of those like Thomas Hobbes and Jacques-Bnigne Bossuet, who argued that monarchy was the most natural and ancient form of government , and since kings receive their power and sanction from God, their authority was absolute and unchallenged. "The power of God makes itself felt in a moment from one extremity of the earth to another. Royal power works at the same time throughout all the realm. It holds all the realm in position, as God holds the earth. Should God withdraw his hand, the earth would fall to pieces; should the king's authority cease in the realm, all would be in confusion." (Bossuet, 1679) This belief in absolute authority, a megalomania of sorts, reinforced the monarch's stance on the nobility, as they represented a threat to his power and security on the throne.Nobles before Louis' reign were feudal lords, and had the means to raise private armies. This was because the lesser nobles acted as the king's agents and in his name collected taxes, posted edicts and dispensed justice. They and their overlords, the higher nobility, provided armies to the king in times of war as the kings before Louis did not possess a standing army of their own. The higher nobles could also build their own fortifications, which gave them the power to hold their ground if they rose against the king.Louis realized that if the nobility continued to hold so much influence, not only will they tend to rebel and create disorder, he himself would be accorded the status of first among equals, and this he found totally acceptable.In order to prevent such a situation, the king began by not including the higher nobility in the his ministry or the conseil, leading the aristocratic diarist Duc de Saint -Simon to call Louis' reign as the "reign of the lowborn bourgeoisie." The king did this in the belief that his power would hold supreme only if he filled the high executive offices with common people or the bourgeoisie, because he could reduce a commoner to a nonentity by dismissing him from his position, whereas a nobleman had his own aura of heritage and influence, which would have been difficult to dismantle. "Instead of the high nobility and royal princes, Louis relied for his ministers on nobles who came from relatively new aristocratic families. Such were Michel Le Tellier, secretary of state for war; Hugues de Lionne, secretary for foreign affairs; and Nicholas Fouquet, superintendent of finances." (Spielvogel,1991) . While commoners were being appointed as ministers and regional governors by virtue of their ability and not birth, Louis made sure that the nobles who had traditionally filled these roles served him ceremonially as courtiers. They were required to spend as much time as possible in attendance of the king who could watch over them and make sure they were not hatching any conspiracy or plots of rebellion against him. As a result, the nobles lost touch with their communities and the lesser nobles in their areas.By persuading the great nobles to remain in court, Louis severed their ties with the lesser nobles who stayed back in the provinces.The two types of nobles became two separate classes, and a duke or prince acting as a courtier could no longer count on a host of clients ready to revolt at his word. By moving to the Chateau of Versailles in 1682, one of the most lavish palaces in European history, Louis furthered his strategy of keeping the nobles under his eye by throwing extravagant entertainments, holding dances, performances and celebrations where the presence of the nobles was mandatory, and which they were only too happy to attend. They were also expected to be always in the best of attire and fashion, and display the utmost grandeur, in keeping with the atmosphere of excess that prevailed in the court. This resulted in an onset of decadence in the nobles, and they willingly obeyed Louis's elaborate codes of court etiquette, wherein the king was attended from morning until the time he went to bed at night by the leading nobles of the realm.The etiqutte was rigorous, and exceptions, if any, were bound to incur the king's displeasure, as we see in Chapter XXXII of the diary of Duc de Saint -Simon: At the beginning of October, news reached the Court, which was at Fontainebleau, that M. de Duras was at the point of death. Upon hearing this, Madame de Saint-Simon and Madame de Lauzun, who were both related to M. Duras, wished to absent themselves from the Court performances that were to take place in the palace that evening. They expressed this wish to Madame de Bourgogne, who approved of it, but said she was afraid the King would not do the same. He had been very angry lately because the ladies had neglected to go full dressed to the Court performances. A few words he had spoken made everybody take good care not to rouse his anger on this point again. He expected so much accordingly from everybody who attended the Court, that Madame de Bourgogne was afraid he would not consent to dispense with the attendance of Madame de Saint-Simon and Madame de Lauzun on this occasion. They compromised the matter, therefore, by dressing themselves, going to the room where the performance was held, and, under pretext of not finding places, going away; Madame de Bourgogne agreeing to explain their absence in this way to the King. I notice this very insignificant bagatelle to show how the King thought only of himself, and how much he wished to be obeyed; and that that which would not have been pardoned to the nieces of a dying man, except at the Court, was a duty there, and one which it needed great address to escape from, without seriously infringing the etiquette established. Living a life of dissipation and following petty court intrigues and ceremonial etiqutte at all times, the nobles lost their edge, and ceased to involve themselves in their financial situations, choosing conveniently instead to depend on the king's munificence in terms of grants and subsidies.The King did not disappoint and heaped the nobles with honorary positions and pensions and their younger sons with ecclesiastical benefices. The king's favour became the avenue for furthering a noble's career as a courtier; and a smile, glance or a polite remark from the king began to be seen as a special honor. "In order to distinguish his principal courtiers, he invented blue short coats embroidered with gold and silver. The permission of wearing these was a great favor to such as were guided by vanity." (Voltaire,1751). He actively encouraged friction between the newly emerging "noblesse de robe" ( persons or families made noble by holding certain official charges) and the nobles from old families by cunningly bestowing his favors so as to create resentment, and the court remained too caught up in small intrigues to care about the bigger picture of the king's absolutist designs. A bigger blow to the strength of the nobility and in favour of the absolute power of the king came when Louis used the edict of 1626 to have all the castles and fortifications erected by the nobility in the interior provinces demolished on the excuse of curbing budgetary expenses: "......we announce, declare, ordain, and will that all the strongholds, either towns or castles, which are in the interior of our realm or provinces of the same, not situated in places of importance either for frontier defense or other considerations of weight, shall be razed and demolished; even ancient walls shall be destroyed so far as it shall be deemed necessary for the well-being and repose of our subjects and the security of this state, so that our said subjects henceforth need not fear that the said places will cause them any inconvenience, and so that we shall be freed from the expense of supporting garrisons in them." ( Robinson, 1906) This measure subtly but effectively did away with the nobles' powers to take a war-like stance. Down the earlier reigns, many posts in the government were sold in order to raise revenue, thereby making a public office a property right.These officials could not be removed unless they were reimbursed high amounts which was not the best option for Louis. Instead, he mandated a massive program of verification of the titles of nobility: oral testimony that maintained their ancestors had always been nobles and lived nobly were no longer acceptable; they needed to produce written evidence like marriage contracts or land documents that they had been noble since the year 1560. Many families were stripped of their titles, and returned to the taxpaying list during this process or forced to pay fines for illegaly usurping noble titles, and this is exactly the end Louis XIV had in mind. He further curtailed the powers of these local royal officials with inherited offices by adding to the duties of the intendants, a class of inspectors employed by the crown since the sixteenth century to visit local provinces from time to time and ensure better efficiency in the government. In Louis' realm, they not only supervised these officials but also actually carried out a majority of the adminnnistration.They were under his strict control, and as such his directives carried weight across the kingdom with all royal officers in inherited positions. Before Louis's reign, the great families of France had preserved the right to rebel against unacceptable royal abuse as one of their fundamental prerogatives and took part in uprisings like the Wars of Religion and the Fronde in the defence of this right. The reign of Louis was remarkably free of such domestic unrest, because in cases where all the methods described above failed, any act of explicit or implicit protest was treated as a form of "lse-majest" and was harshly repressed in an expression of unconcealed despotism. But the real strengths behind Louis' kingship was the efficiency of France's tax collection system which had a bureaucracy of tax collecters in twenty-six different districts, as well as the active promotion of commercial activities during his reign.Both were initiated and run by Jean-Baptiste Colbert the Controller-General, and did much to replenish the coffers of the realm which were perpetually under strain from the prodigal tastes of the monarch. As his Letter to the Town Officers and People of Marseilles written in August,1664 testifies, Louis was keen on promoting commerce, and acknowledged its importance to the realm: "Considering how advantageous it would be to this realm to reestablish its foreign and domestic commerce, . . . we have resolved to establish a council particularly devoted to commerce, to be held every fortnight in our presence, in which all the interests of merchants and the means conducive to the revival of commerce shall be considered and determined upon, as well as all that which concerns manufactures. We also inform you that we are setting apart, in the expenses of our state, a million livres each year for the encouragement of manufactures and the increase of navigation, to say nothing of the considerable sums which we cause to be raised to supply the companies of the East and West Indies; That we are working constantly to abolish all the tolls which are collected on the navigable rivers; That there has already been expended more than a million livres for the repair of the public highways, to which we shall also devote our constant attention; That we will assist by money from our royal treasury all those who wish to reestablish old manufactures or to undertake new ones ; ....." (Robinson,1906) It was this financial security which allowed Louis to have extravagant tastes in entertaining the nobles and bequeathing them with gifts, while retaining the policy of exempting them from tax. For the nobles, everything had apparently changed for the better, and they were thus lulled into a false sense of well-being; and this indolence in the nobles was one of the keys to Louis' absolute power in France. In the words of Voltaire, "This then in general terms, is what Louis XIV did or tried to do to make his country more flourishing...Louis XIV did more for his people than twenty of his predecessors put together..." . As an absolute monarch, Louis is considered a success despite leaving a country on the brink of bankruptcy caused by his dangerously expensive scheme to tame the nobles and other extravagances, because of being the entity responsible for uniting France into a united, centrally governed, strong nation which his predecessors had not achieved in the forty years before him. During his reign, he did indeed wield unquestionable power over his nobles using etiquette as a means of government, but the collaboration of nobles with monarchy tied the fates of both together as they plummeted irrevocably towards the French Revolution that spared neither in its wake. Works Cited Bossuet, J.B. "Political Treatise". Readings in European History 2 vols.Ed. J. H.Robinson.Boston:Ginn 1906. 2: 273-277 Louis XIV. "Edict of 1626 ordering the demolition of the feudal castles in France."Readings in European History 2 vols. ed. J. H. Robinson.Boston:Ginn,1906. 2:270 Louis XIV. "Letter to the Town Officers and People of Marseilles." Readings in European History 2 vols. ed. J. H. Robinson.Boston:Ginn 1906. 2:279-280 Lynn,F. "Empires of the sun: Colonialism and closure in Louis XIV's 1662 Carrousel and Cyrano's Les Estats et les Empires du Soleil."Romanic Review, Nov 1998:1 Saint -Simon, Duc de. The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete. Chapter XXXII. David Widger, 25 Aug 2004 , 13 Nov 2005, Voltaire. The Age of Louis XIV. tr. W. F. Flemming. 2 vols. London: E. R. Dumont. 1756. 1901. 2:320-33. Read More