King of France and patron of the arts, b. 5 September 1638 (Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France), d. 1 September 1715 (Versailles).
Louis XIV was the son of Louis XIII, king of France, and the Spanish queen Anne of Austria. He succeeded his father to the throne before he turned five. In 1648, when he was nine years old, a rebellion of the nobility against the crown started a civil war that lasted until 1653. Louis led a life of fear, hunger and poverty during those years, something he would never forget; the experience instilled a sense of revenge in him against both the nobility and the common people.
In 1658 the young king fell in love with the nice of his prime minister. Marriage with a commoner was of course impossible, and after two years of heartbreak Louis accepted marriage with Marie-Thérèse of Austria, the daughter of the Spanish king, to seal the end of the Spanish-French war that had started three years before his birth. He decided then that power would be a substitute for forbidden love; in his Mémoires he says
When prime minister Mazarin died on 9 March 1661 Louis assembled his ministers the next day and informed them that from now on all government was his own responsibility. "L'état, c'est moi" ("I am the state") - this famous quote from later years describes in a nutshell Louis' concept of the king as God's representative on earth and dictatorship by divine right.
For the remainder of his life Louis XIV was the incarnation of the absolutist monarch who controls everything that goes on in his country, from public works to philosophical disputes, from military activity to dress code at the court.
Louis XIV was determined to transform France into the centre of industrial and intellectual activity of Europe. He personally supervised every detail of a new road system, the construction of canals and ports, the organization of a modern police force and the expansion of the navy and merchant marine and turned the country into an export nation.
At the same time he was an extravagant patron of the arts and transformed the country by building monuments and royal residences everywhere. Many of his grand palaces, such as Saint-Germain and Marly, are now in ruins but Versailles, his greatest achievement (and at the time an outrageous burden on the state finances), remains one of France's cultural treasures.
By the time Louis turned 40 he had managed to neutralize most of the aristocracy, who in the past had started several civil wars against the court, by drawing it closer into court life and organizing continuous banquets and gambling parties. He had led a successful military campaign in the Spanish Netherlands; in Paris he was called "the Great."
The king's fate began to change when his mistress Marquise de Montespan became embroiled in a scandal of sorcery and murder. To protect his reputation Louis dismissed the Marquise and turned to the overly pious governess of his illegitimate children. Gambling and entertainment at the court was now hidden under a cloak of propriety, and hypocrisy became the norm of the day. In 1682 the government was transferred to Versailles, taking the court away from the attractions of Paris.
After unsuccessful attempts to force Protestant Christians to convert to Catholicism Louis XIV in 1685 revoked the Edict of Nantes, which since 1597 had guaranteed freedom of worship in France. The decline of his reign continued with a series of war disasters. But flattery at the court continued, and Louis XIV died as the ultimate representative of the absolute monarch.
Louis XIV had a lasting impact well beyond the borders of France. His attempts to expand French influence through wars were ultimately unsuccessful. (William of Orange played an important role in frustrating his dreams.) But foreign courts, who condemned Louis as a tyrant whose troops committed atrocities, were so impressed by France's cultural achievements that they adopted the French language and court etiquette for their own daily use. In his own country he was grudgingly acknowledged as a great figure of history; Voltaire, who compared him with a Roman emperor, said: "His name can never be pronounced without respect and without summoning the image of an eternally memorable age.""