King Louis Xiii Quotes

and who had the honor to be, as a child, the play-fellow of our king, Louis XIII, whom God preserve! Sometimes their play degenerated into battles, and in these

Comte de la Fere, Touching Some Events Which Passed in France Toward the End of the Reign of King Louis XIII and the Commencement of the Reign

Machiavelli’s teaching would hardly have stood the test of Parliamentary government, for public discussion demands at least the profession of good faith. But it gave an immense impulse to absolutism by silencing the consciences of very religious kings, and made the good and the bad very much alike. Charles V. offered 5000 crowns for the murder of an enemy. Ferdinand I. and Ferdinand II., Henry III. and Louis XIII., each caused his most powerful subject to be treacherously despatched. Elizabeth and Mary Stuart tried to do the same to each other. The way was paved for absolute monarchy to triumph over the spirit and institutions of a better age, not by isolated acts of wickedness, but by a studied philosophy of crime and so thorough a perversion of the moral sense that the like of it had not been since the Stoics reformed the morality of paganism.

Louis XI of France gave enemas to his pet dogs, and Louis XIII had 212 enemas in one year, along with 215 vomiting sessions and 47 bloodlettings. Louis XIV, the King of Clyster, had more than two thousand enemas, sometimes four times in a day. They apparently worked—he lasted seventy-two years on the throne, successfully prosecuted the War of Spanish Succession, and eliminated the last vestiges of feudalism.

The death of his father, Louis XIII, made the boy King of France at four.

Palais-Royal was originally built to house France’s cardinal in the 1600s. When he died, King Louis XIII took control until eventually it became home to the duc d’Orléans and his son, the duc de Chartres.