The Sun King learned to fear rebels while pretending to sleep
One February night in 1651, an angry Parisian crowd forced its way into the royal palace demanding to see the king. They were shown into his bedchamber, where twelve-year-old Louis XIV lay feigning sleep. Satisfied, they left quietly. Decades later he would keep France's nobles close at Versailles.
Louis was born at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1638 to parents who had been married 23 years; his mother, Anne of Austria, had suffered four stillbirths, so courtiers hailed the baby as a miracle and named him Dieudonné, God-given. He was four when Louis XIII died in May 1643. The late king had tried to limit Anne's power through a regency council, but within days she had the Parlement of Paris annul his will, made herself sole regent and installed Cardinal Mazarin as chief minister. The pair were unusually close, and she instilled in her son a belief in the divine right of kings.
In 1648 Anne and Mazarin secured the Peace of Westphalia, gaining Habsburg lands in Alsace for France. That same year they tried to tax members of the Parlement, which refused and ordered earlier royal financial edicts burned. The arrest of the popular leader Pierre Broussel set Paris rioting, launching the civil wars known as the Fronde, in which nobles defended old privileges against a centralising crown. After the intrusion into the palace, Anne fled the capital with her son.
When Mazarin died in 1661, Louis declined to name a successor and governed personally. He drew the aristocracy, many of them former rebels, into residence at his lavish palace of Versailles, draining their independent power. He demanded religious uniformity too: revoking the Edict of Nantes stripped Huguenots of their rights, and the dragonnades that followed drove them to convert or emigrate.
France became Europe's dominant power under him and was almost constantly at war, from the Franco-Dutch War to the War of the Spanish Succession. Peace brought achievements as well: the 240-kilometre Canal du Midi, patronage of Molière and Lully, and the French Academy of Sciences. His reign of 72 years and 110 days is the longest of any monarch. He died in 1715, leaving his great-grandson Louis XV a strong but deeply indebted kingdom.
Source: Louis XIV
