History
King Louis XVI
King Louis XVI was the last king of France before the French Revolution. He ascended to the throne in 1774 and faced economic and social challenges that ultimately led to his downfall. His reign was marked by financial instability, growing discontent among the people, and his eventual execution in 1793, symbolizing the end of the monarchy in France.
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4 Key excerpts on "King Louis XVI"
eBook - ePub- Donald Pennington(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
19LOUIS XIV’S FRANCE AND THE EUROPEAN WARS
THE KING
The reign of Louis XIV has generally been regarded as the epitome of royal absolutism in the seventeenth century. It is a story, like so many others, of mitigated disaster. To give its tragic elements the firm structure approved by the dramatists of his time, Louis would have needed to destroy himself amid the ruin of his state. Instead he lived to see slow deterioration and indecisive defeat. It was never apparent to him that the cost of the state, its monarchy, and its wars impoverished the country, still less that in the long run a state identified with too narrow a privileged élite would collapse. But he could hardly fail to see that the glory he so assiduously manufactured lost its magic. At the beginning of the reign the eulogies were unanimous. Ten years before its end Fènelon wrote:Even the people … who have so much loved you, and have placed such trust in you, begin to lose their love, their trust, and even their respect. They no longer rejoice in your victories and conquests: they are full of bitterness and despair. They believe you have no pity for their sorrows, that you are devoted only to your power and your glory.1Louis had grown up as a king who was both an object of adulation and, from time to time, a refugee. His memories were of hazardous journeys into and out of a half-rebellious capital and through a kingdom where his mother, to whom he was devoted, was clearly not treated by her important subjects as a ruling sovereign. Amid the treachery and intrigue he received the approved education in the classics and the arts, with a large dose of carefully selected history. Mazarin took a personal interest in the political training of, as he saw it, his own successor. Louis’ first great experience of public life was significant. In September 1651, the day after his thirteenth birthday, there was held in the Paris parlement the lit de justice
eBook - PDF- Linda S. Frey, Marsha L. Frey(Authors)
- 2004(Publication Date)
- Greenwood(Publisher)
Although the queen was unfairly libeled, for she was a devoted wife and mother, it is true that she had done nothing to enhance the reputation of the king. Undoubt- edly, Louis XVI faced a daunting task at a time when the institution of kingship was being challenged by intellectuals known as philosophes. The philosophes, men such as Frangois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Mon- tesquieu, and Denis Diderot, challenged the basic institutions of the state, most notably the monarchy and the church, the pillars of the old regime. They used reason and criticism to attack existing inequities, such as unfair taxation, unjust laws, slavery, the evils of war, religious intolerance, bigotry, superstition. But in leveling such charges they eroded the prestige and power of the king and weakened his ability to bring about the very changes they advocated. Economic conditions also played an important role in bringing about revolution. The government primarily relied on direct taxation, and neither the clergy nor the nobility paid this tax. Those who had the least paid the most, and those who had the most paid the least. This sit- uation could not last for long—and it did not. France was on the verge of Historical Overview 3 bankruptcy when Louis XVI came to the throne, and the situation only deteriorated during his reign. Because expenditure exceeded revenue, especially in wartime, the government had to use more and more of the revenue to service the debt. Because Louis XVI became convinced that only in peacetime could fundamental reform be enacted, he avoided commitment abroad, further eroding his prestige and ironically making it more difficult to enact reform.
eBook - PDF- A. Lloyd Moote(Author)
- 1989(Publication Date)
- University of California Press(Publisher)
Introduction: Interpreting Louis XIII A perplexed historian once wrote: Louis XIII was one of those persons whom we do not know how to judge; it is not possible to make pronouncements about him if one wishes to be scrupulously accurate and fair. 1 What perplexed that scholar makes this seven-teenth-century Bourbon king of France an engrossing challenge for a historical biographer. For Louis XIII was driven by the contrary im-pulses of personal insecurity and determination to rule; and by an exalted sense of royal authority that was undermined by unkingly tendencies to be taciturn, morose, suspicious of others, and backbit-ing. He was known to his age by the sobriquet Louis the Just; but a few historians have called him sadistic, and even some contempo-raries thought him a bit cruel. These personal contradictions and para-doxes would be sufficient cause to investigate his life even if his reign had not been important. But his reign was important; and, not surprisingly, it contains paradoxes stemming from his^ baffling personality that beg to be re-solved. How do we reconcile Louis's habitual dependence on others with his decisive acts against those persons when they thwarted his authority? Surely this man—who sprang a coup d'etat against his mother that ended in the assassination of her political favorite, then fought two wars against her, and eventually humiliated her into flee-ing from his realm—was not a weak monarch. Nor does he appear so dependent on others when we learn that as his reign wore on he dis-missed every successive personal favorite who interfered with his I
eBook - ePubDeath and the crown
Ritual and politics in France before the Revolution
- Anne Byrne(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Manchester University Press(Publisher)
Significantly, it was painted seven years before Louis XV was crowned king. An earlier painting by Henri Testlin is tellingly titled Louis XIV en 1648, seulement âgé de dix ans mais déjà roi de France. His coronation took place five years later. Louis XVI was depicted as king in an engraving of 1774 (Figure 10) reproduced in Chapter 4 of this book. His brother, Louis XVIII, who was never formally crowned, appeared in several portraits in full regalia: one by François Gérard even appears to show him sitting on a throne. Alexis Simon Belle’s portrait of Louis XV’s son at age 1 shows the infant dauphin sitting on ermine, possibly on a throne, with one chubby hand wrapped around a crown. Glosses on the coronation from the seventeenth and eighteenth century unabashedly confirmed that the coronation did not make the king, who was said to be king, or perhaps King, by virtue of his birth. As early as the 1620s, Jean Bodin stated emphatically that ‘the king does not cease to be king without crowning or consecration, which are not in the least the essence of sovereignty’ and, in 1722, Nicolas Menin, a keen afficinado of royal ritual, added ‘we recognise the rights of our monarch independent of all ceremony’. 33 These paintings announced the power and status of the sitter, and by extension, the solidity and grandeur of his kingdom. They were political statements as much as works of art, recognised as an important element of the ambassadorial equipment necessary to properly represent the interests of France. 34 Such statements proved necessary and useful through the Bourbon period which, it is often forgotten under the smooth veneer of absolutist myth, regularly experienced the perilous proximity of dynastic instability. The assertion of instant succession was vital to Bourbon success from the first moment of Henri IV’s kingship
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