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Louis XIV: Recent Gains in Historical Knowledge

Louis'XIV has been, and is, a controversial character, one who has been judged politically rather than historically in the past and may well continue to be so judged, even in the future. This seems to be the fate of historical persons who, for one reason or another (length of reign, dramatic career involving many countries), impressed themselves on their ages. The very myths that grow up around them become historical facts in their own right. I need only remind you of the famous cartoon of the late General de Gaulle dressed up as Louis XIV. It shows a lack of knowledge of seventeenth-century realities, but it is clear evidence that there is still political life in our stock figures of the past. There may be a human need for such stock figures,' but it is the historian's privilege and duty to clear away the rubble of political propaganda, contemporary and of later ages. I count it the first, and possibly the most important, gain in Ludovican historiography of the present quarter of this century that historians have begun to clear away accumulated propaganda and have at the same time (and I think in consequence) managed to set Louis XIV into better historical perspective. The First Republic ruined most of the statues of Louis XIV. Not that he would have minded: did he not once complain that France was being rapidly disfigured by a rash of statues of him commissioned by towns and estates? The Third Republic ruined his reputation-his gloire, and that he would have minded very much-by an ideological need to justify the republic. All kings were, after 1871, evil, and one so long-lived and influential as Louis XIV more evil than the rest. It is only very recently, long after the intense interest in and research into all kinds of regional history and into various fields of French artistic and economic life of the Grand Siecle, that the historians of France have taken up the problem of the central government in the age of Louis. It was in a report presented to the Twelfth International Congress of Historical Sciences held at Vienna in 1965 that they hinted the time had come to examine and take seriously government from the center,2 admitting that it was rather illogical to concentrate on the regions and on branches of economic or artistic life in isolation while ignoring the central government. What did it attempt to do? What were its successes and failures? Since then, we have had analytical examinations, among which the one by G. Durand is particularly successful, of the way in which the ancien regime functioned;3 and numerous studies-most of them printed in that invaluable periodical which we call the