The Age of Louis XIV

by Will Durant

  At that moment the Parisians remembered his faults with a blinding clarity. They felt that his love of power and glory had led France to the brink of ruin. They resented the pride that had destroyed local self-government and had centered all rule in one unchallengeable will. They mourned the millions of francs and the thousands of lives that had been spent in beautifying Versailles; and they cursed the neglect with which the King had treated his turbulent capital. A small minority rejoiced that the persecution of the Jansenists might now cease; a large majority still applauded the expulsion of the Huguenots. In retrospect it was clear that the invasion of Holland in 1672, the invasion of Germany in 1688, and the hasty seizure of the barrier towns in 1701 had been massive blunders, raising a swarm of foes around France. But how many Frenchmen had condemned those invasions, or spoken a word of conscience about the double devastation of the Palatinate? The nation had been as guilty as its King, and held against him not his crimes but his defeats. Barring a few priests, it had not condemned his adulteries, and had shown no enthusiasm over his moral reform, his piety, or his fidelity to his morganatic wife. It forgot now that for many years he had graced his power with courtesy and humanity; 100 that, until the demon of war enthralled him, he had supported Colbert in developing French industry and trade; that he had protected Molière against the bigots, and Racine against the cliques; that his extravagant expenditures had not merely indulged his own luxury but had dowered France with a new heritage of art.

  What the people felt most keenly and most justly was the immense price they had paid in blood and treasure for the glory that had now collapsed in the death of the King and the desolation of France. There was hardly a family in the nation that had not lost a son to the wars. Population had been so reduced that the government now gave rewards to the parents of ten children. Taxes had stifled economic incentive, war had blocked the avenues of commerce and had closed foreign markets to French goods. The state was not only bankrupt; it owed three billion francs. 101 The nobility had lost its usefulness by being turned from local administration to prancing about the court; it had shone only in its expensive dress and its martial bravery. A new nobility had been created by wholesale auction of titles to rich commoners; in one year alone the King had ennobled five hundred persons at six thousand livres each; so some ancient families fell vassal to the sons of serfs. As war became no distant contest of mercenaries and gladiators but a pervasive and exhausting test of national resources and economies, the middle classes rose in number and power to challenge the baron and the priest, and financiers prospered amid the general decline. For in modern states the men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things; and the men who can manage money manage all.

  In judging Louis XIV we must remember Goethe’s humane dictum that a man’s vices are usually the influence of his time, while his virtues are his own; or, as the Romans had put it with characteristic brevity, vitium est temporis potius quam hominis—“vices are of the age rather than of the man.” 102 The absolutism, the persecuting bigotry, the lust for glory, the taste for war, were in him as a child of his time and his Church; his generosity and magnanimity and courtliness, his appreciation and stimulation of literature and art, his ability to carry a burden of concentrated and farreaching government, were his personal qualities, making him every inch a king. In Louis XIV, Goethe wrote, nature produced the consummate specimen of the monarchical type, and, in so doing, exhausted herself and broke the mold. 103 “Louis XIV,” said Napoleon, “was a great king. It was he who raised France to the first rank among nations. What king of France since Charlemagne can be compared with him in all his aspects?” 104 “He was,” in Lord Acton’s judgment, “by far the ablest man who was born in modern times on the steps of a throne.” 105 He waged devastating wars, indulged his pride extravagantly in building and luxury, stifled philosophy, and taxed his people to destitution; but he gave France an orderly government, a national unity, and a cultural splendor that won for her the unquestioned leadership of the Western world. He became the head and symbol of his country’s supreme epoch; and France, which lives on glory, has learned to forgive him for almost destroying her to make her great.

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