The death of Louis XIV

Louis XIV by Hyacinthe Rigaud (1701)

 

By ADRIAN TAHOURDIN

Louis XIV reputedly never said ���l�����tat, c���est moi���. The phrase was first attributed to him at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He did, however, utter the sentence, almost his last words, ���Je m���en vais, mais l�����tat demeurera toujours��� (���I���m going, but the State will always remain���), His final agony lasted twenty-three days. Normally a prodigious eater, he left his food mostly untouched.

Louis XIV, le Grand, le Roi Soleil, died 300 years ago today. It���s generally agreed that he endured his suffering with courage and dignity. Even the waspish courtier and memorialist Saint-Simon conceded that in his leave-taking, Louis XIV ���presented the most touching spectacle, which made him admirable��� (���forma le spectacle le plus touchant, qui le rendit admirable���).   

The historian and professor at the University of Paris���VIII Jo��l Cornette, has just published La Mort de Louis XIV: Apog��e et cr��puscule de la royaut�� (367pp. Gallimard. ���21). This fascinating book (which will be reviewed in a future issue of the TLS) appears in a series entitled ���Les Journ��es qui ont fait la France���, the day in question here being September 1, 1715. As the publishers put it, a trifle hyperbolically perhaps, ���This day was the only one over which the Grand Roi had no control, he who wanted to be all-powerful director of his kingdom���. For Cornette, ���the death of Louis XIV closes a chapter in the history of [French] royalty���. In his time the French monarchy reached the apex of its power. Yet he left behind a system of government which, according to Cornette, can still be discerned in the workings of the Fifth Republic today.

Cornette writes that during the final two days of the King���s life all the apartments at Versailles remained closed; in order better to control all information about the imminent death all mail had been stopped. By September 2, an autopsy had been carried out, followed by the process of embalming. The official funeral took place on October 23, six weeks after the body had been transferred to the cathedral of Saint-Denis (now in the northern suburbs of Paris), burial place of French kings down the centuries.

How was the death of Louis XIV greeted? Aside from the torrent of lampoons, with something between indifference and secret relief, Cornette tells us. ���The length, the weight, of an interminable reign had exhausted both spirits and hearts���. (Louis came to the throne in 1643 at the age of five, after the death of his father Louis XIII; although he came of age in 1651, i.e. at thirteen, he only assumed full powers after the death of his chief minister Cardinal Mazarin in 1661.) The priest of Saint-Sulpice, a small parish near Blois, wrote in his Remarques sur l���ann��e 1715, that Louis���s death was ���little regretted by his whole kingdom, because of the exorbitant sums and enormous taxes he had levied on all his subjects���. The only ones to profit in this subjugated, impoverished nation, he went on, were the financiers and the tax collectors. As one verse had it, ���Dans ce tombeau est inhum�� / Un roi si tendrement aim�� / Au commencement de son r��gne; / Sur la fin si peu regrett�� / Qu���on a peur qu���il ne revienne���. ���What a contrast���, Cornette writes, ���with the splendours of August 1660, when the twenty-one-year-old monarch made his triumphal entry into a rejoicing capital!���      

���L�����tat louis-quatorzien��� was above all dedicated to military glory, on land and at sea. France was, it seems, in perpetual conflict during his reign: the Fronde, or civil uprisings of 1648 and 1651���3, the Dutch Wars of the 1670s. In the War of Spanish Succession between 1701 and 1714 nearly 650,000 Frenchmen were mobilized, out of a total population of 20 million. Cornette calls the French state at the time an ���insatiable Leviathan���. Yet, the defeats multiplied: Ramillies (1706), Oudenarde (1708), a costly victory at Malplaquet (1709). Added to which were the terrible winters such as that of 1693���4, during which 1.6 million French citizens perished. A further punishing winter in 1709���10 (average temperatures of ���20 degrees C in the Ile-de-France in January and February, rivers froze over and birds fell out of the sky) carried off another 630,000 citizens ��� the death toll less great this time partly as a consequence of "l'intervention de l'��tat" (which sounds like a slightly anachronistic phrase). 

Religion: in his lifetime Louis heard 2,000 sermons, attended Mass 30,000 times, i.e. one a day, touched some 200,000 people afflicted with scrofula (���le roi te touche, Dieu te gu��risse���). His detestation of Protestantism, meanwhile, grew with the years. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 resulted in some 200,000 Huguenot Protestants choosing exile to England, Holland, or Germany, depriving his country of a valuable skilled workforce. Jansenists fared little better, being viewed as dangerous heretics; their headquarters at the abbey of Port-Royal were closed in 1710, the buildings razed to the ground.  

Louis acknowledged at least twenty-two children, of whom six were legitimate. Cornette writes that there were also ���all those, numerous no doubt, of whose existence we���re unaware���. His affair with Louise de La Valli��re produced five children; only two survived into adulthood. Six of the nine children borne by the beautiful, spirited Marquise de Montespan, Louis���s mistress in the 1670s, went past the age of seven. In Cornette���s nice phrase, after the death of the last of his mistresses, Mme de Fontanges, in 1681, the King ���resolved to think about his salvation���.

The arts and learning flourished in Louis's reign. Cornette lists the bodies that were set up in that time: (the Acad��mie fran��aise had been founded by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635, three years before Louis���s birth)

Acad��mie de peinture et de sculpture (1648)

Acad��mie de danse (1661)

Acad��mie des inscriptions et belles-lettres (1663)

Acad��mie des sciences (1666)

Acad��mie de France �� Rome (1666)

Acad��mie royale de musique (1669)

Acad��mie d���architecture (1671)

Acad��mie d���op��ra (1671)

The Hall of Mirrors at Versailles

But it would be fair to say that Louis���s most visible legacy is the Palace of Versailles, much changed though it apparently is in appearance since his day. (See the American author William Richard Newton���s three-volume history, covering everything from fountains and waterworks to stables; reviewed in the TLS, March 16, 2012.) He first set eyes on the Palace in 1651 while out hunting (a pursuit he followed with a passion) at the age of twelve. The place had been more or less abandoned since the death of Louis XIII.  The Court, with its attendant splendour, was transferred from Paris to Versailles (at one point Louis went four years without visiting the capital). Among the great names associated with the Court of Louis XIV are Racine, who wrote two plays, Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691), to be performed by the girls at the school of Saint-Cyr set up by the King���s second wife the Marquise de Maintenon.

On his deathbed Louis appeared to concede failings: addressing his successor, his great-grandson Louis XV (who himself came to the throne at the age of five and reigned until 1774), he said: ���Do not copy me in my love of building or in my love of warfare . . . try and improve the lot of your people, as I, unfortunately, have never been able to do���. Cornette concludes that while Louis XIV took his authority from God alone and was answerable only to Him, neither Louis XV nor the unfortunate Louis XVI was ever able to display such uncontested authority. After 1715 came the Enlightenment, and then the Revolution.