The Normal Times

The man who made France the most magnificent of kingdoms.

“The role of defender of the traditional constitution was taken up by special interests, notably the parliament of Paris, the corporations of lawyers who sat in and could plead before the first law court of the kingdom.”

J.M Roberts, A History of Europe

At the time of the insurrection of 1648, France was being ruled under regency. The first Fronde occurred in Paris and was followed by an uneasy compromise. The second Fronde was supported by provincial rebels and was the more dangerous. The parliament failed to maintain a united front against the grandees and provincial nobles involved. During these troubles, the Sun King was only a small and frightened child.

In 1660 the regency was over, and Louis XIV assumed his full powers; France would not be ungovernable again until the 1780s. Louis would become the model for monarchs by embodying a new vision of absolute monarchy and for presiding over the golden age of French cultural ascendancy.

The King’s ambitions combined personal, dynastic, and national standing as one and the same. Politics under Louis XIV was reduced to courtiership, administration, and enforcement. His royal councils, as well as provincial royal agents, attendants, and military commanders, took account of the nobility and local immunities, but wreaked havoc on real independence. Louis tamed his aristocrats by offering the greatest among them a home at the most glamorous court in Europe; he gifted them pensions and honors, but he never forgot the Frondes. He excluded his family from the royal council and chose non-nobles to be his ministers. Local representative bodies were curbed; the provincial “estates” were managed by royal officials and parliaments were restricted by their judicial role.

The French Church’s independence from the authority of Rome was asserted to bring the church more securely under the authority of the Most Christian King (one of Louis’s other titles). He did not exile Huguenots, but was paranoid of them at times and determined not to be a ruler of heretics. He pressured them harshly and brutally to convert.

His reign was called the Grande Siecle; he ruled a hierarchical, corporate, theocratic society that was new and revolutionary, but also looked to the past for its goals, and for its sanctions. The glitter owed much to Louis himself. He carried French prestige to a peak at which it was long to remain, partly because of the model of monarchy he presented; he was the perfect “absolute” monarch. He was a legalistic man, preferring to have an existing legal claim good enough to give respectability to what he was doing. His personal foreign and domestic aims were closely entwined with one another, ideology and the royal temperament. Versailles was not only the gratification of personal tastes, but an exercise in a prestige essential to diplomacy. For example, in order to fill its gardens, Louis may buy millions of tulip bulbs a year from the Dutch in spite of hating everything about them.