Louis Xiv Quotes

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

Why do you weep? Did you think I was immortal?

Little by little, the old world crumbled, and not once did the king imagine that some of the pieces might fall on him.

The room was not a room to elevate the soul. Louis XIV, to pick a name at random, would not have liked it, would have found it not sunny enough, and insufficiently full of mirrors. He would have desired someone to pick up the socks, put the records away, and maybe burn the place down. Michelangelo would have been distressed by its proportions, which were neither lofty nor shaped by any noticeable inner harmony or symmetry, other than that all parts of the room were pretty much equally full of old coffee mugs, shoes and brimming ashtrays, most of which were sharing their tasks with each other. The walls were painted in almost precisely that shade of green which Rafaello Sanzio would have bitten off his own right hand at the wrist rather than use, and Hercules, on seeing the room, would probably have returned half an hour later armed with a navigable river.

Had you but seen it, I promise you, your high-minded principles would have melted like candle wax. Never would you have wished such beauty away.

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.

How could they think Noel was hot? If this was REALLY Versailles, Noel SO would not be Louis XIV, he would be the French version of the village idiot

Every time I bestow a vacant office I make a hundred discontented persons and one ingrate. Louis XIV, 1638-1715

There is little that can withstand a man who can conquer himself.

That gimcrack little desk, probably sham antique Louis XIV. She had said something to him once about there being a secret drawer in it. Secret drawer! That would not fool the police long.

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

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.

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.

Evil exists only when its known. Adam and Eve were public in their fall. To sin in private is not to sin at all

The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella).

Ever heard of the Very Reverend William Buckland? No? He was a fucking brilliant Scamp! He was the Duke of Westminster and he actually ate Louis XIV’s heart 150 years after the French king died!

What a web deceit made, its strands strangling the innocent and the guilty alike.

Il est coupable de tout le bien qu'il ne fait pas.

Mignon' said the King, 'soon you are going to be a great king'. But he also told Anjou, in a memorable phrase 'Try to remain at peace with your neighbors: I have loved war too much...

First feelings are always the most natural

Do not assess the justice of a claim by the vigour with which it is pressed.

I shall see.

L'état, c'est moi.

L'architecture n'a rien à voir avec les «styles». Les Louis XV, XVI, XIV ou le Gothique, sont à l'architecture ce qu'est une plume sur la tête d'une femme; c'est parfois joli, mais pas toujours et rien de plus.

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.

History offers us not a single recorded cell phone conversation between Louis XIV and Madame de Montespan in which His Most Christian Majesty wishes he were a tampon, or photos of Nell Gwynn sunbathing topless in her walled garden near Whitehall Palace. It is most certainly our loss.

The Louis XIII style in perfumery, composed of the elements dear to that period - orris-powder, musk, civet and myrtle-water, already known by the name of angel-water - was scarcely adequate to express the cavalierish graces, the rather crude colours of the time which certain sonnets by Saint-Amand have preserved for us. Later on, with the aid of myrrh and frankincense, the potent and austere scents of religion, it became almost possible to render the stately pomp of the age of Louis XIV, the pleonastic artifices of classical oratory, the ample, sustained, wordy style of Bossuet and the other masters of the pulpit. Later still, the blase, sophisticated graces of French society under Louis XV found their interpreters more easily in frangipane and marechale, which offered in a way the very synthesis of the period. And then, after the indifference and incuriosity of the First Empire, which used eau-de-Cologne and rosemary to excess, perfumery followed Victor Hugo and Gautier and went for inspiration to the lands of the sun; it composed its own Oriental verses, its own highly spiced salaams, discovered intonations and audacious antitheses, sorted out and revived forgotten nuances which it complicated, subtilized and paired off, and in short resolutely repudiated the voluntary decrepitude to which it had been reduced by its Malesherbes, its Boileaus, its Andrieux, its Baour-Lormians, the vulgar distillers of its poems.

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....

The voyagers visited the Natchez Indians, near the site of the present city of that name, where they found a 'religious and political despotism, a privileged class descended from the sun, a temple and a sacred fire.' It must have been like getting home again; it was home with an advantage, in fact, for it lacked Louis XIV.

Every one is fond of comparing himself to something great and grandiose, as Louis XIV likened himself to the sun, and others have had like similes. I am more humble. I am a mere street scavenger (chiffonier) of science. With my hook in my hand and my basket on my back, I go about the streets of science, collecting what I find.

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.

Je voudrais voir un peu Louis XIV avec un "assuré social"!...Il verrait si l'Etat c'est lui !..

The room was not a room to elevate the soul. Louis XIV, to pick a name at random, would not have liked it, would have found it not sunny enough, and insufficiently full of mirrors.

Louis XIV lui au moins, qu'on se souvienne, s'en foutait à tout rompre du bon peuple. Quant à Louis XV, du même. Il s'en barbouillait le pourtour anal.

But Louis XIV had clever ministers, mainly men of humble origin chosen for their outstanding ability.

François-Marie Arouet Voltaire, Siècle de Louis XIV, 2 vols. (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966), I,

Did you know that all ladies at Louis XIV’s court at Versailles were required to have a thirteen-inch waist or less? And that their dresses weighed between thirty and forty pounds?

The Bourbon-Orléans family tree is infinitely larger, more ramified, and more intertangled than can possibly be shown here, largely owing to the longevity, fertility, and polygamy of Louis XIV.

Who amongst them realizes that between the Differential Calculus and the dynastic principle of politics in the age of Louis XIV, between the Classical city-state and the Euclidean geometry, between the space perspective of Western oil painting and the conquest of space by railroad, telephone and long range weapon, between contrapuntal music and credit economics, there are deep uniformities?

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.

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

First of all, historically, markets simply did not emerge as some autonomous domain of freedom independent of, and opposed to, state authorities. Exactly the opposite is the case. Historically, markets are generally either a side effects of government operations, especially military operations, or were directly created by government policy. This has been true at least since the invention of coinage, which was first created and promulgated as a means of provisioning soldiers; for most of Eurasian history, ordinary people used informal credit arrangements and physical money, gold, silver, bronze, and the kind of impersonal markets they made possible remained mainly an adjunct to the mobilization of legions, sacking of cities, extraction of tribute, and disposing of loot. Modern central banking systems were likewise first created to finance wars. So there's one initial problem with the conventional history. There's another even more dramatic one. While the idea that the market is somehow opposed to and independent of government has been used at least since the nineteenth century to justify laissez faire economic policies designed to lessen the role of government, they never actually have that effect. English liberalism, for instance, did not lead to a reduction of state bureaucracy, but the exact opposite: an endlessly ballooning array of legal clerks, registrars, inspectors, notaries, and police officials who made the liberal dream of a world of free contract between autonomous individuals possible. It turned out that maintaining a free market economy required a thousand times more paperwork than a Louis XIV-style absolutist monarchy. (p. 8-9)

Memories of the wrath of the League and the clashes of the Fronde had favored the establishment of absolute monarchy; the governments of Louis XIV's despotism, when that great prince went to relax among his ancestors in Saint-Denis, made the yearning for freedom more bitter. The old monarchy had lasted six and a half centuries with its feudal and aristocratic liberties. How long had the state formed by Louis XIV lasted? One hundred and forty years. After that monarch's tomb, there were only two monuments of monarchy: the pillow of Louis XV's debauchery and Louis XVI's executioner's block.

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.

I call it the Louis XIV test: have a look around your house and imagine what Louis XIV would pay for everything you own. Your house? He wouldn’t keep a horse in it. Your furniture? Complete rubbish. Your car? He’d like your car. But he’d give you half of Burgundy in exchange for the small telly in your bedroom.

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.

A pair of young mothers now became the centre of interest. They had risen from their lying-in much sooner than the doctors would otherwise have allowed. (French doctors are always very good about recognizing the importance of social events, and certainly in this case had the patients been forbidden the ball the might easily have fretted themselves to death.) One came as the Duchesse de Berri with l’Enfant du Miracle, and the other as Madame de Montespan and the Duc du Maine. The two husbands, the ghost of the Duc de Berri, a dagger sticking out of his evening dress, and Louis XIV, were rather embarrassed really by the horrible screams of their so very young heirs, and hurried to the bar together. The noise was indeed terrific, and Albertine said crossly that had she been consulted she would, in this case, have permitted and even encouraged the substitution of dolls. The infants were then dumped down to cry themselves to sleep among the coats on her bed, whence they were presently collected by their mothers’ monthly nannies. Nobody thereafter could feel quite sure that the noble families of Bregendir and Belestat were not hopelessly and for ever interchanged. As their initials and coronets were, unfortunately, the same, and their baby linen came from the same shop, it was impossible to identify the children for certain. The mothers were sent for, but the pleasures of society rediscovered having greatly befogged their maternal instincts, they were obliged to admit they had no idea which was which. With a tremendous amount of guilty giggling they spun a coin for the prettier of the two babies and left it at that.

short time ago, while making researches in the Royal Library for my History of Louis XIV, I stumbled by chance upon the Memoirs of M. d’Artagnan, printed—as were most of the works of that period, in which authors could not tell the truth without the risk of a residence, more or less long, in the Bastille—at Amsterdam, by Pierre Rouge.

Of course, differences existed between military service under Henry IV, Louis XIII, or Louis XIV, but one always served on horseback. Today these magnificent creatures were doomed. They had disappeared from the fields and streets, from the villages and towns, and for years they had not been seen in combat. Everywhere they had been replaced by automatons. Corresponding to this change was a change in men: they became more mechanical, more calculable, and often you hardly felt that you were among human beings. Only at rare moments did I still hear a sound from the past – the sound of bugles at sunrise and the neighing of horses, which made our hearts tremble. All that has gone.

but there had been nothing equal to it since the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. (In 1685 Louis XIV had removed that freedom granted to the Huguenots by Henry IV to practise their own religion; it led to persecution followed by widespread emigration.) It was an odd comparison since the Revocation removed a liberty and Catholic Emancipation granted it.

Il est dangereux d'avoir raison dans des choses où des hommes accrédités ont tort.

I could sooner reconcile all Europe than two women

Only small minds want always to be right.

The Sun King had dinner each night alone. He chose from forty dishes, served on gold and silver plate. It took a staggering 498 people to prepare each meal. He was rich because he consumed the work of other people, mainly in the form of their services. He was rich because other people did things for him. At that time, the average French family would have prepared and consumed its own meals as well as paid tax to support his servants in the palace. So it is not hard to conclude that Louis XIV was rich because others were poor. But what about today? Consider that you are an average person, say a woman of 35, living in, for the sake of argument, Paris and earning the median wage, with a working husband and two children. You are far from poor, but in relative terms, you are immeasurably poorer than Louis was. Where he was the richest of the rich in the world’s richest city, you have no servants, no palace, no carriage, no kingdom. As you toil home from work on the crowded Metro, stopping at the shop on the way to buy a ready meal for four, you might be thinking that Louis XIV’s dining arrangements were way beyond your reach. And yet consider this. The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella). You can buy a fresh, frozen, tinned, smoked or pre-prepared meal made with beef, chicken, pork, lamb, fish, prawns, scallops, eggs, potatoes, beans, carrots, cabbage, aubergine, kumquats, celeriac, okra, seven kinds of lettuce, cooked in olive, walnut, sunflower or peanut oil and flavoured with cilantro, turmeric, basil or rosemary … You may have no chefs, but you can decide on a whim to choose between scores of nearby bistros, or Italian, Chinese, Japanese or Indian restaurants, in each of which a team of skilled chefs is waiting to serve your family at less than an hour’s notice. Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals. You employ no tailor, but you can browse the internet and instantly order from an almost infinite range of excellent, affordable clothes of cotton, silk, linen, wool and nylon made up for you in factories all over Asia. You have no carriage, but you can buy a ticket which will summon the services of a skilled pilot of a budget airline to fly you to one of hundreds of destinations that Louis never dreamed of seeing. You have no woodcutters to bring you logs for the fire, but the operators of gas rigs in Russia are clamouring to bring you clean central heating. You have no wick-trimming footman, but your light switch gives you the instant and brilliant produce of hardworking people at a grid of distant nuclear power stations. You have no runner to send messages, but even now a repairman is climbing a mobile-phone mast somewhere in the world to make sure it is working properly just in case you need to call that cell. You have no private apothecary, but your local pharmacy supplies you with the handiwork of many thousands of chemists, engineers and logistics experts. You have no government ministers, but diligent reporters are even now standing ready to tell you about a film star’s divorce if you will only switch to their channel or log on to their blogs. My point is that you have far, far more than 498 servants at your immediate beck and call. Of course, unlike the Sun King’s servants, these people work for many other people too, but from your perspective what is the difference? That is the magic that exchange and specialisation have wrought for the human species.

Mr. Colbert, the famous minister of Louis XIV, was a man of probity, of great industry and knowledge of detail, of great experience and acuteness in the examination of public accounts, and of abilities, in short, every way fitted for introducing method and good order into the collection and expenditure of the public revenue. That minister had unfortunately embraced all the prejudices of the mercantile system, in its nature and essence a system of restraint and regulation, and such as could scarce fail to be agreeable to a laborious and plodding man of business, who had been accustomed to regulate the different departments of public offices, and to establish the necessary checks and controls for confining each to its proper sphere. The industry and commerce of a great country he endeavoured to regulate upon the same model as the departments of a public office; and instead of allowing every man to pursue his own interest in his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice, he bestowed upon certain branches of industry extraordinary privileges, while he laid others under as extraordinary restraints.

This period of decline is exemplified by decadent leaders such as the notorious Emperor Nero (who used a citywide fire in Rome to confiscate land to build an expansive palace), Louis XIV (who expanded the Palace of Versailles while productivity fell and people endured hardships at the height of his power), and the Ming Dynasty’s Wanli Emperor (who withdrew from actively governing and focused on the construction of his own immense tomb).

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.

a middle-aged lady in a small country town, by doing no more than yield whole-hearted obedience to her own irresistible eccentricities, and to a spirit of mischief engendered by the utter idleness of her existence, could see, without ever having given a thought to Louis XIV, the most trivial occupations of her daily life, her morning toilet, her luncheon, her afternoon nap, assume, by virtue of their despotic singularity, something of the interest that was to be found in what Saint-Simon used to call the ‘machinery’ of life at Versailles;

As historian A. Roger Ekirch explains in his 2005 book, At Day’s Close, the idea of lighting the streets of Paris back in the 1600s originally came from the police. Streetlights were one of many new patrol tools implemented by Louis XIV’s lieutenant general of police, Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie. De la Reynie’s plan ordered that lanterns be hung over the streets every sixty feet—with the unintended side effect that Paris soon gained its popular moniker, the City of Light. The world’s most romantic city takes its nickname from a police operation.

Like a traveler discovering the almost identical turf-roofed houses and the terraces that may have greeted the eyes of Xenophon or Saint Paul, I discovered still intact after two centuries in the manners of M. de Guermantes, a man of touching kindness and unspeakable inflexibility, a slave to the most petty obligations yet not to the most sacred commitments, the same aberration that typified court life under Louis XIV, which removes scruples of conscience from the domain of the affections and morality and transforms them into questions of pure form.

My mother, Apolline de Bedée, endowed with great wit and a prodigious imagination, was formed by reading Fénelon, Racine, and Madame de Sévigné. She was nourished on anecdotes of the Court of Louis XIV and knew all of Cyrus by heart. A small woman of large features, dark-haired and ugly, her elegant manners and lively disposition were at odds with my father’s rigidity and calm. Loving society as much as he loved solitude, as exuberant and animated as he was expressionless and cold, she possessed no taste not antagonistic to the tastes of her husband.

The prospect of physical discomfort has not deterred anyone from buying, or sitting in, chairs that hurt. A painful chair, however, is more willingly bought and endured if it carries the imprimatur of a museum or some other respectable design authenticator. Randall Jarrell noted, with great wit but no exaggeration, that there are people who "...will sit on a porcupine if you first exhibit it at the Museum of Modern Art and say that it is a chair. In fact, there is nothing, nothing in the whole world that someone won't buy and sit in if you tell him that it is a chair...

Nevertheless, Voltaire said of this city, that "before Louis XIV., it possessed but four fine monuments": the dome of the Sorbonne, the Val-de-Grâce, the modern Louvre, and I know not what the fourth was—the Luxembourg, perhaps. Fortunately, Voltaire was the author of "Candide" in spite of this, and in spite of this, he is, among all the men who have followed each other in the long series of humanity, the one who has best possessed the diabolical laugh. Moreover, this proves that one can be a fine genius, and yet understand nothing of an art to which one does not belong.

The (unratified) Preamble of the European Constitution begins by stating that it draws inspiration “from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe, from which have developed the universal values of the inviolable and inalienable rights of the human person, democracy, equality, freedom and the rule of law.”3 This may easily give one the impression that European civilization is defined by the values of human rights, democracy, equality, and freedom. Countless speeches and documents draw a direct line from ancient Athenian democracy to the present-day European Union, celebrating twenty-five hundred years of European freedom and democracy. This is reminiscent of the proverbial blind man who takes hold of an elephant’s tail and concludes that an elephant is a kind of brush. Yes, democratic ideas have been part of European culture for centuries, but they were never the whole. For all its glory and impact, Athenian democracy was a halfhearted experiment that survived for barely two hundred years in a small corner of the Balkans. If European civilization for the past twenty-five centuries has been defined by democracy and human rights, what are we to make of Sparta and Julius Caesar, of the Crusaders and the conquistadores, of the Inquisition and the slave trade, of Louis XIV and Napoleon, of Hitler and Stalin? Were they all intruders from some foreign civilization? In truth, European civilization is anything Europeans make of it, just as Christianity is anything Christians make of it, Islam is anything Muslims make of it, and Judaism is anything Jews make out of it. And they have made of it remarkably different things over the centuries. Human groups are defined more by the changes they undergo than by any continuity, but they nevertheless manage to create for themselves ancient identities thanks to their storytelling skills. No matter what revolutions they experience, they can usually weave old and new into a single yarn.

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.

THE SCHOOL FOR Wives criticised was first brought out at the theatre of the Palais Royal, on the 1st of June, 1663. It can scarcely be called a play, for it is entirely destitute of action. It is simply a reported conversation of “friends in council; but we cannot be surprised that it had a temporary success on the stage. It was acted as a pendant to The School for Wives, and the two were played together, with much profit to the company, thirty-two consecutive times. Molière, in the Preface to The School for Wives, mentions that the idea of writing The School for Wives criticised was suggested to him by a person of quality, who, it is said, was the Abbé Dubuisson, the grand introducteur des ruelles or, in other words, the Master of the Ceremonies to the Précieuses. Our author had also just been inscribed on the list of pensions which Louis XIV. allowed to eminent literary men, for a sum of a thousand livres.

Ainsi dans le faste ostenstatoire d'une dernière cérémonie, le bourgeois, laissant à ses fils un héritage plus riche que celui qu'il a reçu de son père, quite ce monde où il a conu au moins deux grands sources de joie, la fortune et la vanité... Thus in the ostentatious pomp of a last ceremony, the bourgeois, leaving his sons a richer heritage than he has received from his own father, departs from this world where he has known at least two great sources of joy, the fortune and the vanity...

Further light - a whole flood of it - is thrown upon this attraction of the male in petticoats for the female, in the diary of Abbé de Choisy, one of the most brilliant men-women of history, of whom we shall hear a great deal more later. The abbé, a churchman of Paris, was a constant masquerader in female attire. He lived in the days of Louis XIV, and was a great friend of Louis' brother, also addicted to women's clothes. A young girl, Mademoiselle Charlotte, thrown much into his company, fell desperately in love with the abbe, and when the affair had progressed to liaison, the abbe asked her how she came to be won... "I stood in no need of caution as I should have with a man. I saw nothing but a beautiful woman, and why should I be forbidden to love you? What advantages a woman's dress gives you! The heart of a man is there, and and what makes a great impression upon us, and on the other hand, all the charms of the fair sex fascinate us, and prevent us from taking precautions.

Under Louis XIV., not to go any further back, the king rightly desired to create a fleet. The idea was a good one. But let us consider the means. There can be no fleet, if, beside the sailing ship, that plaything of the winds, and for the purpose of towing it, in case of necessity, there is not the vessel which goes where it pleases, either by means of oars or of steam; the galleys were then to the marine what steamers are to-day. Therefore, galleys were necessary; but the galley is moved only by the galley-slave; hence, galley-slaves were required. Colbert had the commissioners of provinces and the parliaments make as many convicts as possible. The magistracy showed a great deal of complaisance in the matter. A man kept his hat on in the presence of a procession—it was a Huguenot attitude; he was sent to the galleys. A child was encountered in the streets; provided that he was fifteen years of age and did not know where he was to sleep, he was sent to the galleys. Grand reign; grand century.

You find nothing like that among humans. Yes, human groups may have distinct social systems, but these are not genetically determined, and they seldom endure for more than a few centuries. Think of twentieth-century Germans, for example. In less than a hundred years the Germans organised themselves into six very different systems: the Hohenzollern Empire, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the German Democratic Republic (aka communist East Germany), the Federal Republic of Germany (aka West Germany), and finally democratic reunited Germany. Of course the Germans kept their language and their love of beer and bratwurst. But is there some unique German essence that distinguishes them from all other nations, and that has remained unchanged from Wilhelm II to Angela Merkel? And if you do come up with something, was it also there 1,000 years ago, or 5,000 years ago? The (unratified) Preamble of the European Constitution begins by stating that it draws inspiration ‘from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe, from which “have developed the universal values of the inviolable and inalienable rights of the human person, democracy, equality, freedom and the rule of law’.3 This may easily give one the impression that European civilisation is defined by the values of human rights, democracy, equality and freedom. Countless speeches and documents draw a direct line from ancient Athenian democracy to the present-day EU, celebrating 2,500 years of European freedom and democracy. This is reminiscent of the proverbial blind man who takes hold of an elephant’s tail and concludes that an elephant is a kind of brush. Yes, democratic ideas have been part of European culture for centuries, but they were never the whole. For all its glory and impact, Athenian democracy was a half-hearted experiment that survived for barely 200 years in a small corner of the Balkans. If European civilisation for the past twenty-five centuries has been defined by democracy and human rights, what are we to make of Sparta and Julius Caesar, of the Crusaders and the conquistadores, of the Inquisition and the slave trade, of Louis XIV and Napoleon, of Hitler and Stalin? Were they all intruders from some foreign civilisation?

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.

And in this way — whereas an artist who had been reading memoirs of the seventeenth century, and wished to bring himself nearer to the great Louis, would consider that he was making progress in that direction when he constructed a pedigree that traced his own descent from some historic family, or when he engaged in correspondence with one of the reigning Sovereigns of Europe, and so would shut his eyes to the mistake he was making in seeking to establish a similarity by an exact and therefore lifeless copy of mere outward forms — a middle-aged lady in a small country town, by doing no more than yield whole-hearted obedience to her own irresistible eccentricities, and to a spirit of mischief engendered by the utter idleness of her existence, could see, without ever having given a thought to Louis XIV, the most trivial occupations of her daily life, her morning toilet, her luncheon, her afternoon nap, assume, by virtue of their despotic singularity, something of the interest that was to be found in what Saint-Simon used to call the ‘machinery’ of life at Versailles; and was able, too, to persuade herself that her silence, a shade of good humour or of arrogance on her features, would provide Françoise with matter for a mental commentary as tense with passion and terror, as did the silence, the good humour or the arrogance of the King when a courtier, or even his greatest nobles, had presented a petition to him, at the turning of an avenue, at Versailles.

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.

The Sun King had dinner each night alone. He chose from forty dishes, served on gold and silver plate. It took a staggering 498 people to prepare each meal. He was rich because he consumed the work of other people, mainly in the form of their services. He was rich because other people did things for him. At that time, the average French family would have prepared and consumed its own meals as well as paid tax to support his servants in the palace. So it is not hard to conclude that Louis XIV was rich because others were poor. But what about today? Consider that you are an average person, say a woman of 35, living in, for the sake of argument, Paris and earning the median wage, with a working husband and two children. You are far from poor, but in relative terms, you are immeasurably poorer than Louis was. Where he was the richest of the rich in the world’s richest city, you have no servants, no palace, no carriage, no kingdom. As you toil home from work on the crowded Metro, stopping at the shop on the way to buy a ready meal for four, you might be thinking that Louis XIV’s dining arrangements were way beyond your reach. And yet consider this. The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella). You can buy a fresh, frozen, tinned, smoked or pre-prepared meal made with beef, chicken, pork, lamb, fish, prawns, scallops, eggs, potatoes, beans, carrots, cabbage, aubergine, kumquats, celeriac, okra, seven kinds of lettuce, cooked in olive, walnut, sunflower or peanut oil and flavoured with cilantro, turmeric, basil or rosemary ... You may have no chefs, but you can decide on a whim to choose between scores of nearby bistros, or Italian, Chinese, Japanese or Indian restaurants, in each of which a team of skilled chefs is waiting to serve your family at less than an hour’s notice. Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals. You employ no tailor, but you can browse the internet and instantly order from an almost infinite range of excellent, affordable clothes of cotton, silk, linen, wool and nylon made up for you in factories all over Asia. You have no carriage, but you can buy a ticket which will summon the services of a skilled pilot of a budget airline to fly you to one of hundreds of destinations that Louis never dreamed of seeing. You have no woodcutters to bring you logs for the fire, but the operators of gas rigs in Russia are clamouring to bring you clean central heating. You have no wick-trimming footman, but your light switch gives you the instant and brilliant produce of hardworking people at a grid of distant nuclear power stations. You have no runner to send messages, but even now a repairman is climbing a mobile-phone mast somewhere in the world to make sure it is working properly just in case you need to call that cell. You have no private apothecary, but your local pharmacy supplies you with the handiwork of many thousands of chemists, engineers and logistics experts. You have no government ministers, but diligent reporters are even now standing ready to tell you about a film star’s divorce if you will only switch to their channel or log on to their blogs. My point is that you have far, far more than 498 servants at your immediate beck and call. Of course, unlike the Sun King’s servants, these people work for many other people too, but from your perspective what is the difference? That is the magic that exchange and specialisation have wrought for the human species.

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.

As the Italian diplomat Giovanni Battista Primi Visconti concluded after a lengthy sojourn at the court of Versailles: “He [Louis XIV] knew how to play the king perfectly on all occasions.” During the final decades of his reign, he became a sort of one-man stylistic police, obsessively checking to make sure everything around him constantly lived up to his aesthetic standards. When all was just right, he took great pleasure in the conspicuous display of gorgeousness. For example, on December 7, 1697, the King—he was then fifty-nine—hosted some of the grandest festivities of the age to celebrate the marriage of his eldest grandson, the Duc de Bourgogne. For one evening reception, Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors was lit with four thousand candles, transforming it into a vast arcade of flickering light.

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.

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.

Locke’s conclusion was startling, not to say world shattering. A monarch like Louis XIV, or any of his would-be imitators, in effect is at war with his subjects.§ When that happens, Locke asserted, then lawful government is at an end. We are all thrown back into the original state of nature. “Where the government is dissolved,” Locke explained, “the people are at liberty to provide for themselves, by erecting a new legislative” body to act in their name.38 The social contract starts over from scratch. Government by popular consent is not just a good idea, as it was for Aristotle and Ockham. For Locke, it is an inescapable law of nature. It is what separates a society of free men from a society of slaves.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

Golitsyn passionately admired France and Louis XIV;

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

Shortly before Louis XIV died in 1715, a new ordinance decreed that feces left in the corridors of Versailles would be removed once a week.

The miseries resulting from the overweening power of Spain in days long gone by seemed to be forgotten; forgotten also the more recent lesson of the bloody and costly wars provoked by the ambition and exaggerated power of Louis XIV. Under the eyes of the statesmen of Europe there was steadily and visibly being built up a third overwhelming power, destined to be used as selfishly, as aggressively, though not as cruelly, and much more successfully than any that had preceded it. Thus was the power of the sea, whose workings, because more silent than the clash of arms, are less often noted, though lying clearly enough on the surface.

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.” ​— ​Voltaire, The Age of Louis XIV

His Most Christian Majesty, Louis XIV of France.

in 1699 the lands at the mouth of the great river were named Louisiana in honor of Louis XIV.

The dark face of Louis XIV was marred by the pox, as were the fair features of Charles XII of Sweden.

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

Come, let's go to the maze with its sixteen-foot-high box hedges, designed by Perrault himself, who advised Louis XIV to include thirty-nine fountains each representing one of Aesop's fables. Water jets spurt from the animals' mouths to give the charming impression of speech between the creatures, powered by waterwheels on the Seine. Within here are the Owl and Birds, the Eagle and Fox, the Peacock and Jackdaw, the Wolf and Heron, the Tortoise and Hare, the Council of Mice.

LOUIS XIV’s finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, believed that “the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing.

hatch our survival plan in the coolest place we could find. We made our way into the cluttered room at the windowed front of the deckhouse—what our boat builders back in Hong Kong called the “lavish grand salon” in their sales brochures. With us, it was more like the messy rumpus room. True, the room had, as advertised, “a curved couch, sleek teak paneling, and hardwood cabinetry with a built-in sink.” But the sink had dirty dishes and empty soda bottles in it, the paneled walls were cluttered with a collection of my parents’ favorite treasures (including a conquistador helmet, a rare African tribal mask, a grog jug shaped like a frog, a rusty cannonball from a Confederate gunboat, a bronze clock covered with cherubs that probably belonged to King Louis XIV, and, in a glass shadow box, a rusty steak knife from the Titanic). There were assorted trinkets, necklaces, and coconut heads suspended from the ceiling. Add a heap of scuba and snorkel gear and assorted socks, shoes, and T-shirts on the floor (the floor is our laundry basket), and our grand salon looked more like a live-in recycling bin. “Have we even seen a map for this treasure hunt?” asked Beck. “Nope. Dad just said we needed to be in the Caymans.” “Then we need to find his map.

Thérèse attendait Edouard dans une de ces grandes brasseries de la place Bellecour qui vous font l'effet d'être revenu un siècle en arrière; hauts plafonds, corniches tarabiscotées, fresques bucoliques aux teintes pastel, cuivres rutilants, bois ciré, garçons portant long tablier blanc et moustaches en guidon de vélo. La clientèle était à l'avenant. Derrière la vitre, la place au sol de terre battue rouge brique faisait penser à un immense court de tennis au milieu duquel s'élevait, incongrue, la statue équestre de Louis XIV.

The African villager with a solar powered smartphone has more access to more information than Louis XIV in the halls of Versailles.

The symbol of Louis XIV, the fleur-de-lis branded on a runaway was to be a physical reminder of sovereignty and the limits of moral and legal altruism. Flight infringed on ancien régime doctrine and mores. Flight was a doctrine refusing transcendental indoctrination. Recurrent flight in the era of the Code Noir was sure death. Political orders premised on the juridical paradox eventually became insolvent.