Louis Xiv Of France Quotes

It was like the first time I visited Versailles. There was an eerieness, like I'd been there before. I don't know if I was Louis XIV or Marie Antoinette or a lowly groundskeeper, but I lived there.

Whatever side I take, I know well that I shall be blamed.

Aurangzeb’s contemporaries included such kings as Charles II of England, Louis XIV of France, and Sultan Suleiman II of the Ottoman Empire. No one asserts that these historical figures were ‘good rulers’ under present-day norms because it makes little sense to assess the past by contemporary criteria. The aim of historical study is something else entirely.

I shall see.

First feelings are always the most natural

Dixon was not unconscious of this awed reverence which was given to her; nor did she dislike it; it flattered her as much as Louis the Fourteenth was flattered by his courtiers shading their eyes from the dazzling light of his presence.

Take the very word “etiquette.” From the French for “little signs,” it also connotes “social rules” both in French and in English. In fact, the two meanings share a history. King Louis XIV of France needed to give his nobles a bit of help behaving properly at his palace at Versailles, so little signs were posted telling them what was what—social dos and don’ts for dummies, so to speak.

Earlier maps had underestimated the distances to other continents and exaggerated the outlines of individual nations. Now global dimensions could be set, with authority, by the celestial spheres. Indeed, King Louis XIV of France, confronted with a revised map of his domain based on accurate longitude measurements, reportedly complained that he was losing more territory to his astronomers than to his enemies.

Indeed, King Louis XIV of France, confronted with a revised map of his domain based on accurate longitude measurements, reportedly complained that he was losing more territory to his astronomers than to his enemies.

First things first: Marie Antoinette never said, 'Let them eat cake.' Those words were attributed to an earlier French Queen, Marie-Therese, the wife of the Sun King Louis XIV. By 1767---a year in which Marie Antoinette was still an innocent German-speaking twelve-year-old in Austria....

France actually had the first ever pension schemes: the Invalides, a hostel built by Louis XIV and his prime minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–83), for disabled soldiers.

Does it serve any purpose to ungild the crown of Louis XIV, to scrape the coat of arms of Henry IV? We scoff at M. de Vaublanc for erasing the N’s from the bridge of Jena! What was it that he did? What are we doing? Bouvines belongs to us as well as Marengo. The fleurs-de-lys are ours as well as the N’s. That is our patrimony. To what purpose shall we diminish it? We must not deny our country in the past any more than in the present. Why not accept the whole of history? Why not love the whole of France?” It

Asylums had originated in France in the seventeenth century, under the influence of Louis XIV, who, during the 1660s, locked up anyone likely to oppose him in a giant police operation described by Foucault as ‘the Great Confinement’, when over 6,000 people were incarcerated in the Hôpital Général.

When Marguerite (Marguerite-Louise of France, Grand Duchess of Tuscany), caught malaria, she claimed the royal family of Tuscany was trying to murder her, but that she would, in fact, rather die than return to her husband. Louis XIV asked the pope to threaten excommunication if Marguerite persisted, and the pontiff sent her a harsh letter. She didn't fear hell, she replied she was already living in it.

Joan of Arc! Fancy dying to put a thing like that upon a throne. It would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic. You can say she drove out the English—saved France. But for what? The Bartholomew massacres. The ruin of the Palatinate by Louis XIV. The horrors of the French Revolution, ending with Napoleon and all the misery and degeneracy that he bequeathed to Europe. History might have worked itself out so much better if the poor child had left it alone and minded her sheep.

There is in all these connections a prehistory of the Enlightenment. What were the intentions of those who were proud to give themselves the ‘Enlightenment’ label? In one form, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment did indeed set itself against Christianity, proclaiming itself the enemy of mystery and the emancipator of humankind from the chains of revealed religion. Much of this started as being anti-Catholic rather than anti-Christian: a powerful consideration was the memory of the arch-Catholic Louis XIV of France’s great betrayal of trust in revoking the Edict of Nantes. Often doubt, scepticism or hatred of the Church then moved on to become what we would define as atheism. So an anti-Christian Enlightenment encompassed the anger of Voltaire against clerical stupidity, David Hume’s serene indifference to any hope of life after death that so shocked the diarist James Boswell, Maximilien Robespierre’s cold hatred of Catholicism and the French Revolution’s replacement of the Catholic Church with the goddess of reason. The authors of The treatise of the three impostors would have been delighted by all that, and they should also have been humbled by the quality of some of the minds which they had recruited by their clumsy diatribe.

Louis XIV was a very proud and self-confident man. He had such and such mistresses, and such and such ministers, and he governed France badly. The heirs of Louis XIV were also weak men, and also governed France badly. They also had such and such favourites and such and such mistresses. Besides which, certain persons were at this time writing books. By the end of the eighteenth century there gathered in Paris two dozen or so persons who started saying that all men were free and equal. Because of this in the whole of France people began to slaughter and drown each other. These people killed the king and a good many others. At this time there was a man of genius in France – Napoleon. He conquered everyone everywhere, i.e. killed a great many people because he was a great genius; and, for some reason, he went off to kill Africans, and killed them so well, and was so clever and cunning, that, having arrived in France, he ordered everyone to obey him, which they did. Having made himself Emperor he again went to kill masses of people in Italy, Austria and Prussia. And there too he killed a great many. Now in Russia there was the Emperor Alexander, who decided to reestablish order in Europe, and therefore fought wars with Napoleon. But in the year ’07 he suddenly made friends with him, and in the year ’11 quarrelled with him again, and they both again began to kill a great many people. And Napoleon brought six hundred thousand men to Russia and conquered Moscow. But then he suddenly ran away from Moscow, and then the Emperor Alexander, aided by the advice of Stein and others, united Europe to raise an army against the disturber of her peace. All Napoleon’s allies suddenly became his enemies; and this army marched against Napoleon, who had gathered new forces. The allies conquered Napoleon, entered Paris, forced Napoleon to renounce the throne, and sent him to the island of Elba, without, however, depriving him of the title of Emperor, and showing him all respect, in spite of the fact that five years before, and a year after, everyone considered him a brigand and beyond the law. Thereupon Louis XVIII, who until then had been an object of mere ridicule to both Frenchmen and the allies, began to reign. As for Napoleon, after shedding tears before the Old Guard, he gave up his throne, and went into exile. Then astute statesmen and diplomats, in particular Talleyrand, who had managed to sit down before anyone else in the famous armchair1 and thereby to extend the frontiers of France, talked in Vienna, and by means of such talk made peoples happy or unhappy. Suddenly the diplomats and monarchs almost came to blows. They were almost ready to order their troops once again to kill each other; but at this moment Napoleon arrived in France with a battalion, and the French, who hated him, all immediately submitted to him. But this annoyed the allied monarchs very much and they again went to war with the French. And the genius Napoleon was defeated and taken to the island of St Helena, having suddenly been discovered to be an outlaw. Whereupon the exile, parted from his dear ones and his beloved France, died a slow death on a rock, and bequeathed his great deeds to posterity. As for Europe, a reaction occurred there, and all the princes began to treat their peoples badly once again.

Comment des sociétés contemporaines, restées ignorantes de l'électricité et de la machine à vapeur, n'évoqueraient-elles pas la phase correspondante du développement de la civilisation occidentale ? Comment ne pas comparer les tribus indigènes, sans écriture et sans métallurgie, mais traçant des figures sur les parois rocheuses et fabriquant des outils de pierre, avec les formes archaïques de cette même civilisation, dont les vestiges trouvés dans les grottes de France et d'Espagne attestent la similarité ? C'est là surtout que le faux évolutionnisme s'est donné libre cours. Et pourtant ce jeu séduisant, auquel nous nous abandonnons presque irrésistiblement chaque fois que nous en avons l'occasion (le voyageur occidental ne se complaît-il pas à retrouver le "moyen âge" en Orient, le "siècle de Louis XIV" dans le Pékin d'avant la Première Guerre mondiale, l'"âge de la pierre" parmi les indigènes d'Australie ou de la Nouvelle-Guinée ?), est extraordinairement pernicieux. Des civilisations disparues, nous ne connaissons que certains aspects, et ceux-ci sont d'autant moins nombreux que la civilisation considérée est plus ancienne, puisque les aspects connus sont ceux-là seuls qui ont pu survivre aux destructions du temps. Le procédé consiste donc à prendre la partie pour le tout, à conclure, du fait que certains aspects de deux civilisations (l'une actuelle, l'autre disparue) offrent des ressemblances, à l'analogie de tous les aspects. Or non seulement cette façon de raisonner est logiquement insoutenable, mais dans bon nombre de cas elle est démentie par les faits.

Leonardo began painting Mona Lisa in 1503 or 1504 in Florence, working occasionally on the piece for four years, before moving to France. He worked intermittently on the painting for another three years, finishing it shortly before he died in 1519. Most likely through the heirs of Leonardo’s assistant Salai, the king bought the painting for 4,000 écus and kept it at Château Fontainebleau, where it remained until given to Louis XIV, who moved it to the Palace of Versailles. After the French Revolution, it was relocated to the Louvre. Napoleon I had the portrait moved to his personal bedroom in the Tuileries Palace, but it was later returned to the Louvre.

It is rare to find, learned men who are clean, do not stink and have a sense of humour.

A far deadlier threat to the United Provinces was to come by land from Holland’s mighty neighbor, the France of Louis XIV.

His Most Christian Majesty, Louis XIV of France.

the courage of Dutch seamen and soldiers in resisting the ambitions of Louis XIV of France.

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.

Louis XIV of France said that only the small man desires always to be right. It struck Raven that the route to discovery and knowledge lay not in the desire to be right, but in one's preparedness to be wrong. Perhaps seeking proof that tested one's contention was as important as garnering proof to support it.

Golitsyn passionately admired France and Louis XIV;

The first Satanists known to history appeared in France, between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A courtesan at Louis XIV’s court, Catherine La Voisin, was caught organizing the first Black Masses, rituals in which she and other court dames worshipped the Devil in exchange for favors or material gain.

Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill was born on November 30, 1874, at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, England, into the influential and aristocratic family of the Dukes of Marlborough, a branch of the Spencer-Churchill family, in the closely knit inner circle of Victorian society. Winston S. Churchill’s father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was a direct descendent of John Churchill, the man who became first Duke of Marlborough early in the eighteenth century after fighting for king and country against Louis XIV of France during the War of Spanish Succession.

those who come after us will think that they are just fairy tales

The active quest for a solution to the problem of longitude persisted over four centuries and across the whole continent of Europe. Most crowned heads of state eventually played a part in the longitude story, notably King George III of England and King Louis XIV of France.

The corridors are wide and lined with mirrors and paintings. If King Louis XIV of France had managed office space, it’d look like this.

Louis the 14th, as we know, liked to think of himself as the sun. The dazzling light that irradiated all around him. Like that it may have been, but there was very little warmth. Let no one imagine that life at Versailles was fun. It was, for the most part, bitterly cold, desperately uncomfortable, poisonously unhealthy, and of a tedium probably unparalleled. The most prevalent emotion was fear. Fear of the king himself, fear of his absolute power, fear of the single faultless word or gesture that might destroy one's career, or even one's life. And what was one's life anyway? The ceaseless round of empty ceremonial leading absolutely nowhere, offering the occasional mild amusement, but no real pleasure. As for happiness, it wasn't even to be thought of. Of course, there were lavish entertainments, balls, masques, operas, how else was morale to be maintained? But absentees were noted at once and the reasons for their absence the subject of endless inquiries. Social death, or worse, could easily result.

France’s national image was the product of a collaboration between a king with a vision and some of the most brilliant artists, artisans, and craftspeople of all time—men and women who were the founding geniuses in domains as disparate as wine making, fashion accessorizing, jewelry design, cabinetry, codification of culinary technique, and hairstyling. There was a second collaboration: between Louis XIV and a series of brilliant inventors, the creators of everything from a revolutionary technology for glassmaking to a visionary pair of boots. Each of these areas seems modest enough in and of itself. All together, however, they added up to an amazingly powerful new entity. Thanks to Louis XIV, France had acquired a reputation as the country that had written the book on elegant living.

More and more, people have begun to chant the economic mantras of Louis XIV’s France. A successful restaurant has to do more than serve good food at a good price: it has to create an environment. It’s not enough to offer customers a good product: you have to make them feel special by providing a hefty dose of emotion and drama along with the merchandise.

Louis XIV had sent hundred of soldiers--all men--to New France. These soldiers wanted to start families... But there were six men for every woman... [Louis XIV] announced that he would pay young Frenchwomen large amounts of money if they would go and live in the colonies. Many young women accepted the King's offer...

Such, nearly, was the state of the French theatre before the appearance of Voltaire. His knowledge of the Greeks was very limited, although he now and then spoke of them with enthusiasm, in order, on other occasions, to rank them below the more modern masters of his own nation, including himself still, he always felt himself bound to preach up the grand severity and simplicity of the Greeks as essential to Tragedy. He censured the deviations of his predecessors therefrom as mistakes, and insisted on purifying and at the same time enlarging the stage, as, in his opinion, from the constraint of court manners, it had been almost straitened to the dimensions of an antechamber. He at first spoke of Shakspeare's bursts of genius, and borrowed many things from this poet, at that time altogether unknown to his countrymen; he insisted, too, on greater depth in the delineation of passion—on a stronger theatrical effect; he called for a scene more majestically ornamented; and, lastly, he frequently endeavoured to give to his pieces a political or philosophical interest altogether foreign to poetry. His labours hare unquestionably been of utility to the French stage, although in language and versification (which in the classification of dramatic excellences ought only to hold a secondary place, though in France they alone almost decide the fate of a piece), he is, by most critics, considered inferior to his predecessors, or at least to Racine. It is now the fashion to attack this idol of a bygone generation on every point, and with the most unrelenting and partial hostility. His innovations on the stage are therefore cried down as so many literary heresies, even by watchmen of the critical Zion, who seem to think that the age of Louis XIV. has left nothing for all succeeding time, to the end of the world, but a passive admiration of its perfections, without a presumptuous thought of making improvements of its own. For authority is avowed with so little disguise as the first principle of the French critics, that this expression of literary heresy is quite current with them.

If this had been France, and the Queen had been Louis XIV, it would have been done by now-but it was England, Parliament had its knobby fingers around the Monarch’s throat, and Whigs and Tories were joined in an eternal shin-kicking contest to determine which faction should have the honor of throttling her Majesty, and how hard.

What is usually called the Age of Absolutism in Europe in the 1600s was actually the age of Neoplatonist kingship. Louis XIV was not the only monarch who insisted that he was the living image of God, or that his authority must be as absolute and unquestioned as God’s sovereignty over His creation. The portraits of the others cram the palaces and art galleries of western Europe: Philip III and Philip IV of Spain, Henry IV and Louis XIII of France, Victor Amadeus of Savoy, James I and Charles I of England.

Locke had traveled to France and Versailles. He had seen Louis XIV’s petite levée and watched the elaborate rituals of absolute kingship, of total rule by one man. Locke’s one goal in life was to make sure the same thing never happened in England. But whereas others tried to fight for freedom with guns or plots or revolutions, Locke would fight for it with ideas. His weapon at hand was the manuscript under his arm. “Absolute monarchy,” it read in part, “is inconsistent with Civil Society, and so can be no form of Civil Government at all.” His book revealed why governments must serve the interests of everyone, rather than one person; and why one-man rule was the perversion, not the perfection, of nature—particularly the nature so brilliantly illuminated by his friend Isaac Newton.

The King and his mother sometimes quarrelled about whose dynasty was grander: Louis reminded his mother that his ancestors had been kings of France when hers were mere counts of Habsburg (although, more recently, which may explain part of his ambition, the Bourbons had been mere ducs de Bourbon when the Habsburgs were Holy Roman emperors and kings of Spain). Later, one of Louis XIV’s most admired preachers, Bossuet, would claim that the crown of France was ‘as much above the other crowns of the world as royal dignity surpasses private destinies’.71

Nec pluribus impar (Não inferior aos outros)

Quo non ascendam? (onde não chegarei eu?) - Louis XIV, King of France

Nec pluribus impar (não inferior a outros) - Louis XIV, King of France

The population of the kingdom of France reached 17 million in 1300, more than any other country in Europe.

If you have not seen the court of France, you have not seen what grandeur is.

The Mercantilism represented by the Hamilton-Clay tradition transcends the history of the American political economy in its significance. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, France stood out for state commitment to internal improvements: in 1666, Colbert had convinced Louis XIV to finance the Canal du Midi as one aspect of the generations-long campaign to establish centralized state authority over the still-feudal French nation. Since time immemorial however, the public credit of the state had been predominantly devoted to the financing of war, whether the state was in the hands of a feudal king, an absolute monarch, a republican city-state, or the conflation of royal power circumscribed by parliamentary representatives of the propertied classes and tempered by "the mob" that emerged in Britain from 1688. The game between the financial markets and the state was played out over the terms on which the owners of liquid capital would fund the state's armies relative to the problematic likelihood of their being repaid.

Je m'en vais, mais l'État demeurera toujours

[Louis XIV] announced that he would now rule absolutely, without a council of advisors... No French king had ruled without advisors for almost a hundred years. And no one believed that this elegant young man... would be an efficient ruler.

During [Louis XIV]'s reign, France became the largest and most important nation in Europe.