The Bourbon Kings of France (11 page)

The Fronde collapsed. Peasants and bourgeois alike were desperate for peace; mercenary armies were devastating France and famine was widespread—there were cases of cannibalism. Both the nobles and the lawyers were disillusioned; their challenge to Absolutism had failed utterly. In October 1652 Louis XIV entered Paris to the cheers of its fickle inhabitants. The exiled Charles II of England rode beside him. In December the fourteen-year-old monarch showed both courage and dissimulation in effecting the arrest of Cardinal de Retz (Gondi). The latter was still dangerous in his residence at Nôtre-Dame, guarded by a mob who idolized him. When he visited the young King at the Louvre, he was greeted effusively by Louis, who spoke enthusiastically of a play which he had just seen, his last words as he left the room being, ‘and above all when no one is on the stage’. The words were the signal for his Guards to arrest de Retz, who speedily found himself in Vincennes. Condé, who had fled to Spain, was condemned to death. The Parlement was humiliated by an edict that it must henceforward register all decrees of the royal council. In February 1653 Mazarin returned—he had triumphed, though his hair had turned white. The Fronde was over.

Mazarin was now undisputed master of France. He took pains to train the young King in statecraft; in 1654 he started to hold special sessions of the Council at which business was simplified so that the boy could follow; soon Louis was attending daily. Of this time he wrote in his memoirs how he never ceased to test himself in secret—‘I was delighted and encouraged when I sometimes learnt that my youthful ideas had been adopted by able experienced men.’ His already phenomenal self-confidence was growing. One day in March 1655, while hunting, he learnt that the Parlement had met without authorization to reconsider recent edicts; booted and spurred, Louis strode into the Parlement and told the Président, ‘I forbid you to allow these meetings and any one of you to ask for them.’ He began to impress ambassadors with his knowledge of foreign policy. By 1657 he was visiting Mazarin every morning to discuss matters of state.

The one matter in which the Cardinal did not indulge the King was finance, which he never discussed. While he himself was amassing a vast fortune, Mazarin kept Louis short of ready cash. Voltaire says that he administered the royal finances like the steward of some bankrupt nobleman—the King often had to borrow money. Yet when Mazarin shrewdly presented Louis with all his own enormous wealth, in a specially drawn-up deed, Louis promptly returned it. Until the end he deferred to the Cardinal.

Mazarin’s foreign policy was imaginative. Spain, for whom Condé was now fighting, had recaptured all the French gains, so the Cardinal made an alliance with Cromwell, after which the Spaniards were defeated on both sea and land. In 1658 Turennes won a great victory, the Battle of the Dunes, capturing Dunkirk, the key to Flanders. Louis made a grand entrance into the port, though by the terms of the treaty it soon had to be surrendered to the English. When the Protector died, the French court went into mourning. It was in 1658, too, that Spain made peace, France retaining Artois, Cerdagne and Roussillon and remaining in occupation of the Duchy of Lorraine; Condé received a full pardon. The peace was sealed by Louis’s betrothal to a Spanish princess.

The King was no stranger to the pleasures of the bed. He was said to have been initiated, on his mother’s instructions, by Mme de Beauvais, who was the chief lady-in-waiting and known as ‘One-eyed Cateau’; she lay in wait for him as he returned from his bath. From her he went on to various chambermaids and laundresses, contracting gonorrhea to his shame and self-disgust.

In 1657 he had fallen head over heels in love with Mazarin’s niece, Marie Mancini, who was only seventeen. Mme de Motteville describes her as sallow and scraggy, but in fact she was pretty enough, and interesting too—an intense blue-stocking with huge brown eyes. She refused to become his mistress, the affair being highly intellectual; they exchanged verses and read favourite books to each other. Louis gave her his little dog, Friponne, and bought her Henrietta Maria’s pearls (poverty had forced the English Queen to sell them). By 1658 the King wanted to marry Marie and was encouraged by the exiled Queen Christina of Sweden. Mazarin was horrified when Louis asked him for his niece in marriage; he told the King that he would stab Marie rather than allow her to disgrace the throne. The lovers parted tearfully in the courtyard of the Louvre, Marie crying, ‘You are King and you are weeping and yet I have to leave!’ A long, sad farewell lasted until the autumn of 1659 when Marie begged Louis to stop writing to her. (She became the wife of the Roman Prince Colonna, in whose father’s household Mazarin’s father had been a servant; it turned out an unhappy marriage.)

In June 1660 like his father before him, Louis married an Infanta of Spain. At the nuptial blessing in the church at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, near the Spanish border, Maria Theresa wore a dress of silver brocade with a forty-foot train of blue velvet; she was small and stout, almost a dwarf, with a long, fat face partly redeemed by wonderfully curly hair of brilliant gold, and bright blue eyes. Her husband, whom she was meeting for the first time—they had been married by proxy—was in gold brocade; she was alarmed by his insistence on consummating their marriage the same night. The following year Maria Theresa presented him with a Dauphin (Louis—known to history as
le Grand Dauphin
, to his contemporaries as
Monseigneur
), but the six other children who followed all died in infancy. Amiable, good-natured, but unintelligent, always chattering in bad French, she bored Louis. The poor young woman solaced herself with prayer and by indulging her passion for rich food, especially chocolate, and garlic sauces.

At twenty-two Louis XIV was a handsome, well-built little man of five feet four inches, dark-skinned, with long brown hair. His face was round, with a firm yet sensual mouth, and was dominated by a great Bourbon nose; at this time he wore a pencil-thin moustache. His eyes are sometimes described as grey, sometimes as hazel, being of that changeable hue which the French call
chatoyant
. Despite his small size—he wore six-inch heels to offset it—he had broad shoulders and was unusually muscular. He possessed an unmistakably regal presence and what contemporaries describe as an almost god-like way of carrying himself. He was already a man of overwhelmingly strong personality, with a rather grave charm, which was enhanced by beautiful manners; he seldom joked for fear of hurting people’s feelings.

Louis was highly intelligent, with a marked sense of justice and fair play. (Lord Acton considered him ‘by far the ablest man who was born in modern times on the steps of a throne’.) Although sensitive and emotional, he displayed almost complete self-control from a very early age—he never showed signs of pain, never gave way to weariness before his courtiers; in some ways he resembled an actor perpetually on stage. Like his grandfather he had voracious appetites, being a gargantuan eater and an insatiable womanizer, and like all Bourbons he loved hunting. A need for constant exercise was evident in long walks, in tennis and pall-mall, and in his enjoyment of dancing in court ballets.

So far the reign of Louis XIV had been very like that of Louis XIII. There had been a long minority under a tactless Queen Regent, who governed through an Italian favourite. The turbulence of the great nobles and the lawyers had plunged France into civil wars of just the same sort as those of the early years of the preceding reign. Finally, order had been established by a strong and ruthless First Minister.

From 1660, however, the Cardinal was ailing—he had cancer. Early on the morning of 9 March 1661 Pierrette, Louis’s old nurse who still slept in his bedchamber, woke the King to tell him that Mazarin was dead. Louis rose, dressed, and locked himself in the Cardinal’s room, weeping. When he emerged he ordered the court to go into mourning as if for a member of the royal family—he had been fond of the old man, almost as a second father (in his memoirs he wrote that he had loved him).

Next day Louis summoned the Council to meet at the Louvre, at seven o’clock in the morning. Each of its members hoped to be the new First Minister and all were astonished when the King told them, ‘It is time for me to govern. You will help me with advice when I ask for it … Secretaries of State, I order you to sign nothing without my command, not even a passport or a safe conduct.’ From his memoirs it is evident that Louis was amused by the Council’s astonishment—he saw that they expected him to grow bored. He wrote, ‘A man reigns by work and it is ungrateful and presumptuous to God, unjust and tyrannical to men, to wish to reign without working.’ He himself often worked a full eight-hour day, reading every document which bore his name.

Even at this early age he had evolved the principles which governed his reign. Mazarin had assured him that he could be the greatest King the world had ever known. He wrote proudly, ‘A ruling and over-riding passion for greatness and glory obliterates all others’; and that for a King ‘the love of glory has all the same subtle shades and, may I say, all the same questionings as the tender passions.’ Louis considered himself not only master of his subjects but also owner of their goods; this belief was not his own invention, but was derived from the place of the Emperor in Roman Law. Nor was it a concept without dignity, for Louis also believed that it was his duty to consider the welfare of his subjects rather than his own. ‘If God gives me grace to do all I hope to, I will bring happiness during my reign, to such an extent that … nobody, however poor he may be, shall be uncertain of his daily bread, either from his own labour or from public assistance by the state.’

Louis XIV set out to be a great King at a moment when France had decided that she wanted to be a great nation. He threatened Spain, and even the Papacy, with war merely because of trivial insults to his ambassadors. The French applauded, and welcomed his early campaigns. Their attitude was a little like that of the Germans in 1933—they wanted a ruler who would give them self-respect. After the remote Louis XIII, the country was delighted to find itself with a charming and accessible young King. Their adulation affected even
les Grands
, in the same way that Hitler’s popularity cowed the German ruling classes. The upper ranks of the French nobility had been badly shaken by the débâcle of the Fronde. If Richelieu could bring them to heel, an able King who governed for himself, and was a popular idol, could easily exploit their lack of self-confidence.

Louis had the hypnotic charisma later possessed by Napoleon and by Hitler. Saint-Simon writes of his ‘terrifying majesty’. His all-seeing glance could make the haughtiest duke tremble—he could make even Condé shake with fear. Fascist writers of the 1920s and 1930s saw him as a precursor of the Dictators—a ruler who embodied the National Will, the Warrior King of
Action Française
. But, unlike Hitler and Mussolini, and indeed unlike Napoleon, Louis put his office before himself; he was the anointed King of France rather than Louis XIV. Voltaire has a revealing story, that when a sycophant proposed that the Académie should debate which was the King’s greatest virtue, Louis actually blushed.

The Dauphin was born in June 1662. The King held a fête in celebration, in an enclosure between the Louvre and the Tuileries (which is still known as the Place de Carrousel—or ‘Tournament Place’). Three Queens were watching from a dais—Anne of Austria, Maria Theresa and Henrietta Maria of England. The court celebrated just as the Valois would have done, with jousts and a trot-past to music of five companies of horsemen in fantastic costumes—Romans, Persians, Turks, Indians and Americans. Louis was at their head in the role of King of the Romans, clad in flame-colour.

It was about this time that he adopted the sun in splendour as his emblem (Louis XIII had chosen the device of a sun appearing from behind a cloud to symbolize his son’s birth). Many other French Kings had used emblems—Louis XII the porcupine, François I the salamander—but none to such effect. For Louis XIV, the sun in splendour was a personal declaration of policy; he wrote in his memoirs, ‘I chose the sun because of the unique quality of its radiance … the good it does everywhere, endlessly creating joy and activity on all sides … Certainly the brightest, most beautiful image of a great King.’

His determination to be master was quickly shown. The
Surintendant des Finances
, Nicolas Fouquet, had plundered the royal treasury, exaggerating statements of government expenditure, and was parading his insolent and ostentatious luxury. He had prepared a refuge against disgrace by fortifying the island of Belle-Ile with cannon and armed retainers. He possessed a stranglehold over the treasury and the King feared him as a dangerous obstacle to financial reform. In August 1661 the unsuspecting Fouquet invited Louis to his magnificent château at Vaux-le-Vicomte (which was reputed to have cost eighteen million livres, about £ 750,000 in English money of the period); where he was giving a splendid housewarming party with a firework display and a play by Molière. Amid the bursting rockets, Louis grew angrier and angrier; he was particularly incensed by Fouquet’s arms, a climbing squirrel, and his motto, ‘What heights shall I not reach’, which were depicted everywhere. On the way home the King said to his mother, ‘Madame, he is going to disgorge our money!’ Within three weeks, Fouquet was in the Bastille (having been arrested by M d’Artagnan) and Louis made sure that he stayed in prison until his death nearly twenty years later.