Louis XIV and French Monarchy

Abstract

Louis XIV was the product of a monarchic tradition which was instilled into him from childhood. His tutors read to him each evening several pages of François Eudes de Mézerai’s Histoire de France (3 vols, 1643–51)¹ which was intended to inculcate in him a reverential sense of standing in a line of French kings stretching back many centuries. The young king was instructed in the development of French monarchy from earliest times to the present, and was acquainted with the personalities, achievements and failures of his predecessors; his favourite reading in his youth was the biography of his grandfather, Henri IV, written by Louis’s tutor Hardouin de Péréfixe, later Archbishop of Paris.² Louis’s historical studies avoided sentimental or romanticised interpretations of the past. They stressed the immense challenges which monarchy in France had surmounted — the Hundred Years War, the Wars of Religion — and forewarned Louis that he too would encounter difficulties and hardships as he ruled a notoriously volatile kingdom. They encouraged him nevertheless to be positive in the exercise of kingship. Monarchy, he was taught, was the very focus of the nation; in a sense the king was France.³