Louis XIV. Makers of History Series

Louis XIV, from the Makers of History Series is a popular biography by John Stevens Cabot Abbott of the Sun King of France, who ruled from 1643 to 1715. Louis XIV (1638-1715) had the longest reign of any major European monarch in history and stood at the center of seventeenth and early-eighteenth-century European political and cultural life.

Louis XIV came to the throne at the age of four in 1643 after the death of his father Louis XIII. The early years of the reign were managed by his mother Anne of Austria as regent and by Cardinal Mazarin as chief minister. He took personal control of the government in 1661 after Mazarin’s death and ruled directly until his own death fifty-four years later. The reign produced the centralized French absolutist state, the palace at Versailles, the Wars of Devolution, the Dutch War, the Nine Years War, and the War of the Spanish Succession, along with the broader transformation of France into the dominant European power across most of the period.

The cultural dimensions were equally important. The French court at Versailles became the model for European royal courts across the following century. The Académie française and the other French cultural institutions produced work that dominated European intellectual life for decades. French replaced Latin as the standard language of European diplomacy and high culture. The classical French theater of Corneille, Racine, and Molière reached its peak during the reign.

Abbott’s biography was widely used in American schools and as popular reading. French historical material had continuing interest for American readers throughout the nineteenth century, both for its intrinsic dramatic appeal and for the various French connections to American history.

Abbott handles the reign in the broadly heroic mode while acknowledging criticisms of French absolutism. The treatment is accessible for general readers without classical or French historical preparation.

The book runs about three hundred pages. It pairs with the other Makers of History volumes and with the substantial English-language scholarship on Louis XIV including the work of Voltaire, Saint-Simon, and the modern academic histories.