Power in Stone by Geoffrey Parker

Author:Geoffrey Parker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

8

Grandeur: Louis XIV and Versailles

In the seventeenth century the principal centre of power in Europe shifted from the Mediterranean to northern Europe. This fundamental geopolitical change was marked by the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 which ended the Thirty Years War. In 1618, at the beginning of that war, Spain was still the dominant power in Europe, but by the time it ended everything had changed. Spain had been greatly weakened and was not even a signatory to the treaty which dealt mainly with the new arrangements in post-Westphalian northern Europe. The power of the Holy Roman Empire was much curtailed and the Protestant kings and princes were accorded full recognition. In one of the treaty’s constituent parts, known as the Treaty of Münster, the United Provinces were recognized as an independent state and became the Dutch Republic. This small but dynamic country was to dominate world trade for the rest of the century.

The country which now replaced Spain as the dominant power in Europe was France. For the rest of the century this power was engaged in the entrenchment of its position and in the further enlargement of its territory by steadily moving its frontier eastwards. In 1643 Louis XIII, who had been king throughout the Thirty Years War, died and his four-year-old son, Louis XIV, ascended the French throne. The country was run by a Regency with a dominant first minister, Cardinal Mazarin. The death of Mazarin in 1661 gave Louis the opportunity to assert his authority and he was able to take full charge of the government of his country. There were many who aspired to power of the sort which Mazarin, and before him Richelieu, had enjoyed but Louis was strong willed and did not allow this to happen. A later painting of the king emphasized this by depicting him as Jupiter with the inscription ‘Le Roi gouverne par luimême’ (The King rules alone).

Louis XIV carried on a great deal of the foreign policy of his predecessors but with far greater vigour and aggression. Most of his long reign was taken up with wars in which the French frontier moved inexorably eastwards, adding large parts of the Spanish Netherlands, Franche Comté and Alsace to the king’s domains. By the closing years of the seventeenth century the area of France had increased by about a third over what it had been a century earlier. By then the country also had the largest population in Europe and had become by far the continent’s strongest military and economic power.

Louis was determined to assert both the dominant position of his country and his own position of dominance in France. In seeking to achieve his goal, he embarked early in his reign on the building of a new centre of royal power. This was symbolic of his intentions and was intended to impress all who visited it with the power of his country and the magnificence of his monarchy. Paris had been the French capital since the country had first come into being in the ninth century and the Louvre, the splendid royal palace, was at its heart.

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