France

Louis XIV (1638-1715) was king of France from 1643 to 1715. He brought the French monarchy to its peak of absolute power and made France the dominant power in Europe. His reign is also associated with the greatest age of French culture and art.

The king’s grandfather Henry IV granted French Protestants, known as Huguenots, political and religious freedoms when he issued the Edict of Nantes in 1598. By the 1680s, however, the devoutly Catholic Louis XIV believed his faith should be the sole religion of his country. After years of persecuting Protestants and constricting their rights, the Catholic king revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685 through his issuance of the Edict of Fontainebleau, which ordered the destruction of Protestant churches, the closure of Protestant schools, and the forced baptism and education of children into the Catholic faith. The edict led 200,000 or more Huguenots to flee France in search of religious freedom elsewhere in Europe or in the American colonies.

Marie-Thérèse gave birth to six of the king’s children, but only one, Louis, survived past the age of five. Louis XIV, however, had a healthy libido and fathered more than a dozen illegitimate children with a number of mistresses. Mistress Louise de La Vallière bore five of the king’s children, only two of which survived infancy, while her rival Madame de Montespan, who eventually became the king’s chief mistress, gave birth to seven of the monarch’s children. Louis XIV eventually legitimized most of his children born to mistresses in the years following their births.

Louis was the son of Louis XIII and his Spanish queen, Anne of Austria. He succeeded his father on May 14, 1643. At the age of four years and eight months, he was, according to the laws of the kingdom, not only the master but the owner of the bodies and property of 19 million subjects.

The king’s first true love was Mazarin’s niece, Marie Mancini, but both the queen and the cardinal frowned upon their relationship. Louis XIV was ultimately directed into a marriage that was a political, rather than a romantic, union by wedding the daughter of Spain’s King Philip IV, Marie-Thérèse, in 1660. The marriage between the two first cousins ensured ratification of the peace treaty that Mazarin had sought to establish with Hapsburg Spain.

It took more than two decades for King Louis XIII and his wife, Anne, to have Louis XIV as their first child. So relieved were the royal couple to have a direct heir to the throne that they christened the boy Louis-Dieudonné, meaning “gift of God.

If the name alone didn’t give Louis XIV an inflated sense of himself, Mazarin also instilled in the boy the notion that kings are divinely chosen. Reflecting that belief, Louis XIV believed any disobedience to his edicts to be sinful, and he adopted the sun as his emblem since France revolved around him as the planets revolved around the sun.

In 1682 Louis XIV officially moved his court to the lavish palace at Versailles, 13 miles outside of Paris. Europe’s grandest palace became a center of political power and a symbol of the king’s dominance and wealth. In addition to the royal court, the 700-room palace housed the nobility that Louis XIV had brought into his sphere as well as the thousands of staff needed for upkeep.

After the civil war known as the Fronde forced a young Louis XIV to flee his palace in Paris, the monarch took a dislike to the capital city. Beginning in 1661, the king transformed the royal hunting lodge in Versailles where he played as a boy into a monument of royal opulence.

The Louisiana Territory became American property after the United States purchased it in 1803, and the state of Louisiana joined the union in 1812.