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Born on September 5, 1638, to King Louis XIII of France and his Habsburg queen, Anne of Austria, the future Louis XIV was his parents’ first child after 23 years of marriage; in recognition of this apparent miracle, he was christened Louis-Dieudonné, meaning “gift of God.”

A younger brother, Philippe, followed two years later. When his father died on May 14, 1643, 4-year-old Louis inherited the crown of a fractured, unstable and nearly insolvent France.

After orchestrating the annulment of Louis XIII’s will, which had appointed a regency council to rule on the young king’s behalf, Anne served as sole regent for her son, assisted by her chief minister and close confidant, the Italian-born Cardinal Jules Mazarin.

During the early years of Louis XIV’s reign, Anne and Mazarin introduced policies that further consolidated the monarchy’s power, angering nobles and members of the legal aristocracy.

Beginning in 1648, their discontent erupted into a civil war known as the Fronde, which forced the royal family to flee Paris and instilled a lifelong fear of rebellion in the young king. Mazarin suppressed the revolt in 1653 and by decade’s end had restored internal order and negotiated a peace treaty with Hapsburg Spain, making France a leading European power.

The following year, 22-year-old Louis married his first cousin Marie-Thérèse, daughter of King Philip IV of Spain. A diplomatic necessity more than anything else, the union produced six children, of whom only one, Louis, survived to adulthood. (A number of illegitimate offspring resulted from Louis XIV’s affairs with a string of official and unofficial mistresses.)

After Mazarin’s death in 1661, Louis XIV broke with tradition and astonished his court by declaring that he would rule without a chief minister. He viewed himself as the direct representative of God, endowed with a divine right to wield the absolute power of the monarchy.

To illustrate his status, he chose the sun as his emblem and cultivated the image of an omniscient and infallible “Roi-Soleil” (“Sun King”) around whom the entire realm orbited. While some historians question the attribution, Louis is often remembered for the bold and infamous statement “L’État, c’est moi” (“I am the State”).

Immediately after assuming control of the government, Louis worked tirelessly to centralize and tighten control of France and its overseas colonies. His finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, implemented reforms that sharply reduced the deficit and fostered the growth of industry, while his war minister, the Marquis de Louvois, expanded and reorganized the French army.

Louis also managed to pacify and disempower the historically rebellious nobles, who had fomented no less than 11 civil wars in four decades, by luring them to his court and habituating them to the opulent lifestyle there.

A hard-working and meticulous administrator who oversaw his programs down to the last detail, Louis XIV nevertheless appreciated art, literature, music, theater and sports. He surrounded himself with some of the greatest artistic and intellectual figures of his time, including the playwright Molière, the painter Charles Le Brun and the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully.

He also appointed himself patron of the Académie Française, the body that regulates the French language, and established various institutes for the arts and sciences.

To accommodate his retinue of newly devoted nobles (and, perhaps, to distance himself from the population of Paris), Louis built several lavish châteaux that depleted the nation’s coffers while drawing accusations of extravagance.

Most famously, he transformed a royal hunting lodge in Versailles, a village 25 miles southwest of the capital, into one of the largest and most extravagant palaces in the world, officially moving his court and government there in 1682.

It was against this awe-inspiring backdrop that Louis tamed the nobility and impressed foreign dignitaries, using entertainment, ceremony and a highly codified system of etiquette to assert his supremacy.

Versailles’ festive atmosphere dissipated to some extent when Louis came under the influence of the pious and orderly Marquise de Maintenon, who had served as his illegitimate children’s governess; the two wed in a private ceremony approximately one year after the death of Queen Marie-Thérèse in 1683.

In 1667 Louis XIV launched the War of Devolution—the first in a series of military conflicts that characterized his aggressive approach to foreign policy—by invading the Spanish Netherlands, which he claimed as his wife’s inheritance. Under pressure from the English, Swedish and especially the Dutch, France retreated and returned the region to Spain, gaining only some frontier towns in Flanders.

This unsatisfactory outcome led to the Franco-Dutch War (1672-1678), in which France acquired more territory in Flanders as well as the Franche-Comté region. Now at the height of his powers and influence, Louis established “chambers of reunion” to annex disputed cities and towns along France’s border through quasi-legal means.

France’s position as the dominant military and economic power on the continent—coupled with a colonial presence that burgeoned under Louis XIV—was perceived as a threat by other European nations, including England, the Holy Roman Empire and Spain.

In the late 1680s, responding to yet another spate of expansionist campaigns by Louis’ armies, several powerful countries formed a coalition known as the Grand Alliance. The ensuing war, fought on both hemispheres, lasted from 1688 to 1697; France emerged with most of its territory intact but its resources severely strained.

More disastrous for Louis XIV was the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), in which the aging king defended his grandson Philip V’s inheritance of Spain and its empire. The long conflict plunged a famine-ridden France into massive debt, turning public opinion against the crown.

It was not only decades of warfare that weakened both France and its monarch during the latter half of Louis XIV’s reign. In 1685, the devoutly Catholic king revoked the Edict of Nantes, issued by his grandfather Henry IV in 1598, which had granted freedom of worship and other rights to French Protestants, known as Huguenots.

With the 1685 Edict of Fontainebleau, Louis ordered the destruction of Protestant churches, the closure of Protestant schools and the expulsion of Protestant clergy. Protestants would be barred from assembling and their marriages would be deemed invalid. Baptism and education in the Catholic faith would be required of all children.

Roughly one million Huguenots lived in France at the time, and many were merchants, artisans or other types of skilled workers. Although emigration of Protestants was explicitly forbidden by the Edict of Fontainebleau, thousands of people—estimates range from 200,000 to 800,000—fled in the decades that followed, settling in England, Switzerland, Germany and the American colonies, among other places.

Louis XIV’s act of religious zeal—advised, some have suggested, by the Marquise de Maintenon—had cost the country a valuable segment of its labor force while drawing the outrage of its Protestant neighbors.

Louis XIV’s childhood was marked by the upheaval of the Fronde (1648-1653), which left him with a lasting horror of disorder.  The Fronde had shown that the royal judges of the Parlement, the great nobles, the provincial political elites, and the common people could all pose threats to royal authority.  Louis XIV would attempt to insure that none of these groups would be able to oppose the central government as they had during the Fronde.

During the early years of his reign, Louis XIV remained dependent on Mazarin, the minister who had loyally served his mother during the Fronde.  Mazarin transmitted to Louis XIV the practices that Henri IV, Sully, and Richelieu had developed in the early decades of the seventeenth century.  The treaty of the Pyrenees (1659) ended the long war between France and Spain, which had continued even after the settlement of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, on terms favorable to France.  France had clearly replaced Spain as Europe’s most powerful kingdom.

As an adolescent, Louis XIV threw himself into the social whirl of the court and the pursuit of young women; he did not seem particularly serious about his political responsibilities.  When Mazarin died in 1661, everyone expected him to find a new principal minister to take on the burden of actually running the government.  To the court’s surprise, Louis announced that he intended to be his own principal minister.  There would be no equivalent to Sully, Richelieu, or Mazarin for the rest of his reign.  Soon after Mazarin’s death, Louis had the ambitious finance minister Fouquet, who had hoped to dominate the government, arrested, and his lavish estate confiscated.  Impressed by the architect and garden designer who had created Fouquet’s palace at Vaux-le-Vicomte, Louis later hired them to create his own palace at Versailles.

Although Louis XIV tried to oversee all aspects of the government, he did rely on ministers for assistance in carrying out his policies.  The fate of Fouquet had shown these men, however, that they could not aspire to personal dominance in the style of Richelieu and Mazarin.  Louis was careful to divide his favor among competing ministers and encourage rivalries among them, so that he would always be in a position to make the decisions that mattered.

The most important minister in the first half of Louis XIV’s reign was Colbert, a former assistant of Mazarin’s.  Colbert is remembered above all for his efforts to regulate the French economy.  He believed that an organized effort was needed to allow France to surpass its rivals, particularly the Netherlands and England.  French merchants and manufacturers were strictly regulated to avoid what Colbert regarded as wasteful competition and to make sure that their goods were of high quality.  Colbert tried to encourage the development of domestic manufactures to replace goods that France had had to import from abroad, especially expensive luxury products.  His mercantilist policies discouraged imports through high tariffs and tried to build up export industries whose sales abroad would increase the amount of money flowing into the kingdom.

Building up France’s economy was just one part of Louis XIV’s program for increasing the country’s power.  In his view, the most important duty of a ruler was to seek gloire (glory) for himself and his country through military successes.  The war minister, Louvois, was put in charge of organizing an army that soon grew to be Europe’s largest.  In 1665, Louis XIV launched an attack on the Spanish provinces in the Netherlands, along France’s northern borders.  This War of Devolution (1666-68) added the important city of Lille to French territory.  In 1672, France attacked the Netherlands, an important commercial rival.  The French expected an easy victory over their much smaller opponent, but the Dutch succeeded in finding allies and put up a stiff resistance.  Although Louis XIV’s propagandists proclaimed the war a triumph, in fact it ended in 1678 with only minor gains for France.

At home, Louis XIV continued his efforts to strengthen royal power.  He systematized Richelieu’s method of controlling the provinces through appointed officials by creating a system of permanent intendants, one for each of the country’s provinces.  The intendants, who could be moved or dismissed by the king, oversaw the enforcement of laws and the collection of taxes, and reported regularly to the king about events in their province.  French subjects became accustomed to the permanent presence of royal authority throughout the country.  In 1673, Louis curtailed the powers of the parlements, the royal courts.  They were forbidden to protest against the provisions of new laws until after they had registered them.  This greatly reduced the courts’ ability to obstruct royal policy and influence the population.

Although he was determined to be obeyed, Louis XIV understood that he needed cooperation from his subjects to carry out his policies.  He offered the country’s noble elites a virtual monopoly on government offices and favors in exchange for their support.  In France’s towns, elected city councils were replaced with officials named by the king, who could be counted on to give him their loyalty.  To raise money, he created and sold an ever-increasing number of venal offices.  Louis XIV distrusted the lower classes, viewing them as a potential source of disorder.  He created large hopitaux (hospices) where beggars, orphans, criminals and the insane were forcibly locked up under tight supervision.

Like his predecessors Henri IV and Louis XIII, Louis XIV wanted to see France achieve religious unity.  Although he was a devout Catholic, he resented the Pope’s efforts to control the French Church.  In 1682, he imposed the Gallican articles on the French hierarchy, giving the king almost total control over the naming of bishops and the internal affairs of the church.  Urged on by militant Catholics who convinced him that the Protestant minority was too weak to resist, Louis decided in 1685 that the time had come to revoke the edict of Nantes.  Protestant worship in France was forbidden, and drastic measures, such as quartering troops in Protestant homes, were used to pressure them to convert.  About one-third of France’s Protestants fled abroad to escape this persecution; others formed an underground movement, holding religious services in forests and remote mountain areas.  The Protestant exiles waged a propaganda campaign against Louis XIV from their refuges in the Netherlands and elsewhere, significantly damaging the king’s reputation abroad.

Throughout the early 1680s, Louis XIV continued his aggressive drive to expand France’s borders, particularly along the Rhine river.  The annexation of the historically German city of Strasbourg in 1681 gave him control of the strategic province of Alsace.  France’s push toward the Rhine brought Louis XIV into conflict with the Austrian Habsburg dynasty, but Emperor Leopold I was distracted by a war against the Ottoman Empire, whose armies threatened his capital of Vienna in 1683.  Although the Austrians were fellow Christians, Louis XIV encouraged the Turks, further poisoning relations with the Habsburgs.

Once the Austrians had defeated the Turks, they joined an alliance with France’s other enemies.  Leadership of this coalition came from the Dutch leader William of Orange, who became king of England in 1688 as William III, replacing James II who Louis XIV had supported.  In 1688, France found itself involved in a new round of warfare against an alliance that included all the other major European powers: England, the Netherlands, Austria, and Prussia.  Huguenot exiles driven out of France after 1685 waged an effective propaganda campaign against Louis XIV.  The war of the League of Augsburg lasted until 1697.  The death of the capable war minister Louvois in 1691 deprived Louis of a valuable advisor.  Although the French won some major battles, Louis XIV was unable to break up the enemy coalition, and the final peace settlement was a barely disguised defeat for him.

The war of the League of Augsburg left France financially exhausted, and the aging king was not eager to start another conflict.  When Charles II, the king of Spain, died without an heir in 1700 and left his throne to a French Bourbon prince, however, Louis found himself in a dilemma.  France’s enemies refused to accept an arrangement that they feared would some day lead to a union of France and Spain.  Louis was unwilling to renounce such a significant gain in France’s diplomatic and military position.  Negotiations with William III and Leopold I broke down, and in 1701 France again found itself at war with the British, Dutch, and Austrians.

The war of the Spanish Succession (1701-1713) was the largest and costliest European war up to that time.  At its height, the French army grew to more than 400,000 men, three times as large as it had been during the Thirty Years’ War.  The cost of maintaining this huge war effort was crippling.  Taxes increased to record levels.  The king’s effort to increase the capitation, a tax paid by all subjects regardless of their social status, put a strain on the alliance with the nobility that had been the basis of Louis’s system.  Protestants in the remote southern region of the Cévennes revolted in 1703, starting a guerilla war that became an additional drain on resources.  The French army also suffered several major defeats, most notably at the battle of Blenheim in 1704, when the British forces commanded by the Duke of Marlborough won a devastating victory.

The disasters of the war generated increasing criticism of Louis XIV and his heavy-handed absolutist system.  Merchants and manufacturers complained about the rules and regulations that hindered their activities.  At the court, many high nobles resented their exclusion from any real political role and talked about the necessity of reducing the excessive powers Louis XIV had gathered into his hands.  One unhappy noble, the duc de Saint-Simon, documented their complaints in his extensive diaries.  His acid portrait of the aging king and his faction-ridden court was published after his and the king’s death, and has become both a literary classic and the source of much of our knowledge about French politics and opinion under Louis XIV.