Louis XIV and the Height of Absolutism (1643-1715)
1643 à 1715
On 14 May 1643, the death of Louis XIII placed on the throne a child of four and a half, Louis XIV, under the regency of his mother Anne of Austria and the ministry of Cardinal Mazarin, Richelieu’s protégé and political heir. This ministerial continuity made it possible to complete, through the victories of Rocroi, Fribourg, Alerheim and then Lens, the military work begun two decades earlier against the Habsburgs, and to bring to its conclusion, with the Peace of Westphalia of October 1648, the Thirty Years’ War that had bled Europe since 1618.
This external victory was not enough, however, to guarantee internal peace in a kingdom exhausted by twenty years of wartime taxation. From the autumn of 1648, the parliamentary Fronde, then, from 1650, the Fronde of the Princes, plunged the monarchy into five years of unrest in which the young king experienced the humiliation of a nocturnal flight from Paris and the spectacle of a nobility taking up arms against its own crown. Only at the price of a return to internal order, followed by victory over Spain sealed by the Treaty of the Pyrenees of 1659 and the marriage to the Infanta Marie-Thérèse, could France close this first quarter-century of crises and hand down intact, on Mazarin’s death in 1661, a royal power that nothing seemed able to challenge any longer.
It was on this reconquered foundation that, from 1661, the dominant trait of the reign unfolded: an unprecedented absolutist centralisation, which Louis XIV henceforth intended to exercise alone, without a chief minister. The fall of Fouquet, the rise of Colbert and the growth of Colbertist economics, the construction of Versailles as an instrument of representation and of bringing the nobility to heel, formed the pillars of a royal power that reached its diplomatic and territorial peak at the Peace of Nijmegen of 1678-1679, which earned the king the title of “Louis the Great.” This same reign, however, saw from the turn of the 1680s a religious hardening marked by the dragonnades and then by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and engaged in an almost uninterrupted succession of wars — Devolution, Holland, the League of Augsburg, the Spanish Succession — which progressively exhausted the kingdom’s finances and population.
These major threads can be read in the very trajectory of French power: from the territorial peak of Nijmegen to the annus horribilis of 1702-1707, marked by the disasters of Höchstädt, Ramillies and Turin, then to the unhoped-for rally at Denain in 1712 that saved the kingdom from invasion. This last war was accompanied by trials of unprecedented severity: the demographic catastrophe of the great winter of 1709, which caused several hundred thousand deaths, and the dynastic hecatomb of 1711-1712, which in less than a year swept away three generations of direct heirs and left only the future Louis XV, then aged two, surviving.
Louis XIV died at Versailles on 1 September 1715, after seventy-two years of reign — the longest in French history — fifty-four of which were spent personally governing the kingdom. This reign, which saw the French monarchy reach the height of its absolutist power before revealing, in its final decades, its financial, military and demographic limits, thus constitutes a pivotal period in national history, whose nineteen stages retraced here — from the regency of the queen mother to the annulment of the royal will by the regent Philippe d’Orléans — trace the complete arc: that of a rise toward triumphant absolutism, then that of a decline which the Sun King himself was not to see close before his own death.
I. 1643–1648: The Regency of Anne of Austria and Mazarin’s Ministry, the Last Victories of the Thirty Years’ War and the Beginnings of the Fronde
Barely five days after the death of Louis XIII, his widow Anne of Austria had the late king’s will annulled, at a lit de justice held at the Parlement of Paris with the assistance of Chancellor Séguier — a will that had limited her powers to a council of regency presided over by Gaston d’Orléans. Now regent in her own right, she immediately appointed, to the general astonishment of the court, Cardinal Mazarin — already a member of the council designated by Louis XIII — as chief minister. This personal continuity with Richelieu’s ministry, of which Mazarin had been the protégé, was to govern the kingdom until 1661 and bring to completion the military work begun two decades earlier against the Habsburgs.
This nascent authority nevertheless had to be defended by force from the very first months of the ministry. From May 1643, François de Vendôme, Duke of Beaufort, and Marie de Rohan, Duchess of Chevreuse, wove with several other Grandees of the kingdom a plot known as the Cabale des Importants, aimed at securing Mazarin’s dismissal, deemed hostile to the interests of the nobility, and at negotiating a separate peace with Spain. The plot failed: Beaufort was arrested on 2 September 1643 and imprisoned for five years in the keep of Vincennes, while the Duchess of Chevreuse and the Dukes of Vendôme, Mercœur and Guise were exiled. This swift repression at once consolidated the new minister’s authority against a nobility that had hoped to exploit the regency to recover the influence lost under Richelieu.
This achievement found its crowning moment in a series of victories won by two young generals already revealed at Rocroi. On 3, 5 and 9 August 1644, the Duke of Enghien — the future Grand Condé — and Turenne fought against the Bavarian troops of Franz von Mercy, entrenched at Freiburg im Breisgau, in the Battle of Freiburg, known as the “Battle of the Three Days”: after a victorious assault on 3 August, a second assault was repulsed on the 4th with 4,000 killed and wounded in the French ranks, before the arrival of 5,000 reinforcements allowed Condé to secure the decision and force von Mercy to evacuate the city on 9 August — the bloodiest battle of the entire Thirty Years’ War, of which the commander of the Bavarian cavalry, Jean de Werth, is said to have remarked upon discovering the battlefield: “In twenty-two years of my bloody trade, I have never seen such a slaughterhouse.” A year later, on 3 August 1645, Condé and Turenne faced von Mercy again at the Battle of Alerheim, known as the second Battle of Nördlingen: their Franco-Weimarian army, 23,000 to 27,000 strong, first suffered the collapse of Condé’s wing, before Turenne, by seizing the Wennenberg, forced the Imperial troops to retreat; von Mercy was killed there, and the Bavarian troops, believing themselves encircled, capitulated that same evening.
The Battle of Rocroi, 1643: Maurice Leloir, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/, via Wikimedia Commons
The war’s last great battle was fought three years later on French soil. After Archduke Leopold William of Habsburg took Lens on 17 August 1648, Condé, at the head of an army nonetheless inferior in numbers — around 20,000 men against the Spanish troops — feigned a retreat on 20 August before counterattacking: the enemy cavalry, repulsed, panicked and abandoned its infantry, leaving 3,000 dead and 5,000 Spanish prisoners for 1,500 men disabled on the French side. This victory at Lens convinced Emperor Ferdinand III, who had already been negotiating for five years, to finally accept the peace terms: on 24 October 1648, the Treaty of Münster, signed between France and the Empire within the broader framework of the Peace of Westphalia, ended thirty years of war by granting France the Austrian possessions of Upper Alsace as well as sovereign rights over several imperial cities — sealing, alongside Sweden, the lasting weakening of the Habsburgs and a new European balance whose foundations Richelieu had laid without living to see it come about.
The Ratification of the Treaty of Münster, 1648: Gerard ter Borch, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Yet this external victory was not enough to appease the tensions accumulated within the kingdom by twenty years of wartime taxation. As early as 13 May 1648, the Parlement of Paris, the Chambre des comptes, the Cour des aides and the Grand Conseil had united in an Arrêt d’Union into a single assembly, meeting as the Chambre Saint-Louis, to draft twenty-seven articles demanding the dismissal of the intendants, the submission of tax levies to the approval of the sovereign courts, and guarantees of individual liberty. The convergence of military victory and political crisis then occurred with unexpected brutality: taking advantage of the Te Deum celebrated on 26 August at Notre-Dame for the victory of Lens, Mazarin had the principal leaders of the Chambre Saint-Louis arrested, including the highly popular councillor Pierre Broussel. Paris was covered in barricades the very next day, and under the pressure of the riot, the regent had to consent, on 28 August, to Broussel’s release. Conferences held at Saint-Germain between the court and a parliamentary delegation, from 25 September to 4 October, finally produced a compromise: on 22 October 1648, two days before the signing of the Treaty of Münster itself, Anne of Austria signed a declaration — registered on the 24th — taking up almost entirely the reforms demanded by the Chambre Saint-Louis, including the suppression of the intendants and a habeas corpus for officers. This complete retreat by the crown, wrested in the street rather than negotiated at the table of power, settled nothing fundamentally and suggested that the peace regained abroad would not be enough to guarantee peace at home.
II. November 1648 – 11 March 1649: The Parliamentary Fronde, the Flight to Saint-Germain and the Peace of Rueil
The Declaration of Saint-Germain brought no lasting relief: Anne of Austria and Mazarin, resolved to regain the upper hand rather than continue making concessions, chose a trial of strength. On the night of Epiphany, from 5 to 6 January 1649, the queen had Louis XIV, then ten years old, and his younger brother the Duke of Anjou put to bed, then had them woken after midnight and led by a hidden staircase to the garden of the Palais-Royal; the royal family, accompanied by Mazarin and several princes and officers, left Paris through the Porte de la Conférence at two in the morning to take refuge at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where the entire court slept on straw the first night and frequently lacked necessities thereafter.
The Parlement of Paris replied as early as 8 January by declaring Mazarin a disturber of public peace and an enemy of the state, and pronouncing his expulsion — a decree that was to remain unenforced until the March peace. That same day saw the opening of the Blockade of Paris, entrusted by the regent to the Prince of Condé, whose firmness only hardened the frondeurs’ positions rather than breaking them. Within the besieged capital, Paul de Gondi, coadjutor of the Archbishop of Paris since 1643, who had first tried to establish himself as mediator between the queen and the parliamentarians of the Chambre Saint-Louis before being curtly rebuffed by Anne of Austria, then swung openly into the frondeur camp: he raised at his own expense a “Corinth regiment” and organised Parisian resistance, out of personal ambition — he coveted a cardinal’s hat — as much as out of opposition to the ministerial system. The frondeur camp received a reinforcement of an altogether different order on 10 January, when Condé’s own brother, Armand de Bourbon, Prince of Conti, and his brother-in-law the Duke of Longueville, rallied to Paris; the following day, 11 January, the Parlement proclaimed Conti “generalissimo of the armies,” after the prince had promised to “spend his life to the last drop of his blood in the King’s service under the Parlement’s authority” — placing thus, at the summit of the kingdom’s greatest family, two brothers in opposing camps.
The military tightening around Paris continued methodically throughout the month of February. On 8 February, Condé, seconded by Gaston d’Orléans, seized Charenton-le-Pont, defended by the troops of his own brother Conti, in order to cut the route linking the capital to the Brie region; the assault, fratricidal in its command, cost the lives of the two commanders present on the ground, the frondeur Clanleu and, on the royal side, Gaspard IV de Coligny, Duke of Châtillon, a Protestant converted in 1643 and a personal friend of Condé. The blockade proved, however, far from watertight: on 9 and 10 February, the frondeur generals managed to bring into Paris a large convoy of food and livestock from Étampes, via Chevilly and Villejuif. Condé nevertheless tightened the vice by taking Montlhéry on 16 February, closing the road to the Beauce, then Brie-Comte-Robert on 28 February, completing the cutting of the Brie road.
These limited military successes finally convinced both camps to negotiate: on 11 March 1649, Anne of Austria and Mazarin concluded with the president of the Parlement, Mathieu Molé, the Peace of Rueil. The Parlement obtained a general amnesty for parliamentarians and rebels, the maintenance of the twenty-seven articles of May 1648, confirmation of the suppression of the intendants, and a ban on the king creating new offices; in return, it annulled its January decree of expulsion against Mazarin and undertook to hold no more assemblies “for whatever causes, pretexts or occasions.” This lame compromise closed the parliamentary Fronde without fully satisfying anyone: the people and the bourgeoisie of Paris, who had chiefly hoped for Mazarin’s fall, saw their main expectation disappointed, the cardinal remaining firmly in place at the regent’s side.
III. March 1649 – July 1653: The Fronde of the Princes, Condé’s Arrest, Revolt and the Return to Order
The irony of the situation soon turned against the very man who had saved the crown at Charenton. Fearing the growing influence of the victor of Rocroi and Lens, Mazarin had Condé, his brother Conti, and his brother-in-law the Duke of Longueville, arrested on 18 January 1650, at the Palais-Royal itself. According to Voltaire, no crime could be imputed to Condé; the arrest, carried out by Guitaut, captain of the queen’s guards, had been preceded by a consummate ruse of the cardinal, who had the prince himself sign, without his grasping its import, the order to keep the guards of the Louvre ready — Condé thus signed, with his own hand, the order for his own arrest. The three princes were taken to the keep of Vincennes, where several provincial revolts broke out in their name without managing to shake the regime.
It was, on the contrary, an unexpected convergence of all of Mazarin’s former adversaries that finally brought him down. Surrounded by the union of the nobility and the parliamentarians, the cardinal left Paris in disguise on the night of 6 to 7 February 1651, not without having had Le Tellier draft the orders for the princes’ release — opening an exile of eleven months that was to last until the following 24 December. On 13 February 1651, Condé, Conti and Longueville, freed, made a triumphant entry into Paris; in the name of Gaston d’Orléans, the coadjutor Paul de Gondi had the city gates guarded and the Palais-Royal blockaded by the bourgeois militia, effectively placing the regent and the young king under the surveillance of their own adversaries — the nadir of royal power throughout this crisis. A few months later, on 7 September 1651, Louis XIV, aged thirteen, was declared of age despite the persisting unrest: at a fifth lit de justice held in the Grand’Chambre of the Parlement, he declared his wish to “henceforth take the government [himself],” while Anne of Austria, ceasing to be regent, became head of the Council. This legal end of the regency, however, did nothing to end the crisis, which was not institutional but political in nature.
Freed but dissatisfied, Condé refused any lasting reconciliation with the court: withdrawn to his estates, he broke openly a few months later and signed, through his agent Lenet, a treaty of alliance with Spain — the first prince of the blood to take up arms alongside the hereditary enemy, in the midst of the Franco-Spanish war. On 6 to 7 April 1652, he confronted royal troops at the Battle of Bléneau: during the night, he routed and destroyed part of Marshal d’Hocquincourt’s army, forcing him to retreat toward Auxerre, before Turenne, arriving with forces that were nonetheless inferior — a royal army of thirteen to fourteen thousand men against Condé’s, with a corps of 3,500 men holding Briare — counterattacked in the morning and contained the enemy by skilfully exploiting the terrain; the clash cost 400 to 500 dead and 500 to 600 prisoners among the royal ranks.
Three months later, on 2 July 1652, Condé’s army, pushed back by Turenne to the very walls of Paris, narrowly escaped annihilation during the Battle of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, fought at the very gates of the Bastille. Salvation came from as spectacular as it was unexpected a political gesture: Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans, known as la Grande Mademoiselle, daughter of Gaston d’Orléans, obtained from her father the order to mobilise the Parisian forces, went herself to the Bastille and had the fortress’s cannons turned on Turenne’s army, inflicting heavy losses and allowing Condé to withdraw safely into Paris. Mazarin reportedly commented on this gesture with a remark that has remained famous: “She has killed her husband” — an allusion to the fact that the king, whom she hoped one day to marry, would never forgive her this affront to the crown.
This tactical victory nevertheless proved a political disaster for Condé, now discredited in the eyes of Paris for having had cannons fired on the capital. On 21 October 1652, Louis XIV and Anne of Austria left Saint-Germain to make a triumphant entry into Paris and settle at the Louvre; the very next day, a lit de justice pronounced a general amnesty for all frondeurs except Condé, whom the royal declaration of 12 November 1652 stripped of his dignities and governorships — a decree of the Parlement was to condemn him to death in absentia on 27 March 1654. Mazarin himself was able to return to Paris on 3 February 1653, without notable incident, so strong had the kingdom’s weariness and general desire to restore order become. Only Bordeaux still resisted for a few months: the Ormée, the radical wing of the Fronde, seized control of the city at the end of June 1653, before the Prince of Conti, by then rallied to the crown, signed the 20 July 1653 Peace of Bordeaux, with a general amnesty except for the principal Ormist leaders — thus closing, five years after the Arrêt d’Union, the entire frondeur cycle that had held the kingdom in check.
IV. August 1653 – 7 November 1659: The End of the War with Spain, Turenne against Condé, and the Treaty of the Pyrenees
The internal pacification of the kingdom did nothing to end the external war, in which Condé continued to bear Spanish arms against his former homeland. As early as the summer of 1654, he besieged Arras, from 3 July to 25 August, seeking to retake this stronghold that had fallen into French hands in 1640 while the kingdom still appeared weakened by the Fronde; three French army corps — those of Turenne, La Ferté and Fabert — converged on the city, and on 25 August, the relief army completely routed the Spanish lines, inflicting at least 7,000 losses and forcing Condé to flee. This “relief of Arras” constituted the first great military success of the personal reign begun three years earlier. The following year, Turenne confirmed this advantage by successively taking the strongholds of Landrecies, Condé-sur-l’Escaut and Saint-Ghislain, completing the establishment of French superiority on this front.
It was this series of setbacks that drove Condé to seek his revenge. Turenne had been besieging Valenciennes since 18 May 1656 when, on the night of 15 to 16 July, the relief army of Don Juan José of Austria and Condé appeared before the city. Condé broke through Marshal La Ferté’s sector with surprising determination, while Don Juan, at the head of 4,000 men, brilliantly charged the French camp; Turenne managed to repel this assault but failed to relieve La Ferté, who was taken prisoner along with several hundred officers and soldiers, as well as fifty cannon and the entire correspondence of the French command. This defeat, one of the few in Turenne’s career, showed that the end of the Fronde had not been enough to settle a conflict more than twenty years old.
The turning point came from an unexpected diplomatic alliance. On 23 March 1657, Mazarin concluded with Oliver Cromwell the Treaty of Paris: France undertook to supply 20,000 men, England 6,000 soldiers and its fleet, for a joint campaign against the Flemish strongholds of Gravelines, Dunkirk and Mardyck, with Dunkirk and Mardyck to revert to England and Gravelines to France. This Franco-English coalition won a decisive victory on 14 June 1658, at the Battle of the Dunes, near Dunkirk: Turenne’s army, about 20,000 strong including 6,000 English troops of the New Model Army, faced that of Don Juan José of Austria and Condé, some 14,000 to 15,000 strong; the English pikemen broke through the Spanish centre and right in an instant, while Condé, on the left, resisted and then launched a brilliant counter-offensive before finally being repelled by Turenne’s cavalry, supported by the English ships. The surrender of Dunkirk followed this victory within a few days, making peace henceforth inevitable.
This peace was signed on 7 November 1659 on the Isle of Pheasants, on the Pyrenean border, between Mazarin and the Spanish minister Luis de Haro: the Treaty of the Pyrenees granted France Roussillon, Cerdagne, Artois and several strongholds in Flanders and Lorraine, definitively making the kingdom the foremost power on the continent. The treaty also provided for the marriage of Louis XIV to the Infanta Marie-Thérèse of Spain, who renounced for herself and her descendants all rights to the crown of Spain — a renunciation made conditional on the payment of a dowry of 500,000 écus which Mazarin knew perfectly well Spain was incapable of paying, and on the default of which Louis XIV was later to base his own claims. Condé’s fate finally provoked bitter discussions: Spain demanded his full restoration to his estates and prerogatives, which Louis XIV at first refused, wishing to make him pay for his treason; Mazarin ultimately had to yield, obtaining in return three additional strongholds in Hainaut — Philippeville, Marienbourg and Avesnes — as ransom for the pardon granted to the victor of Rocroi, who thus returned to France after nine years of exile and war against his own country.
V. 7 November 1659 – 10 March 1661: The Spanish Marriage and the Death of Mazarin, Louis XIV Takes the Reins of the Kingdom Alone
The Spanish marriage provided for by the Treaty of the Pyrenees had not come without a personal sacrifice, imposed on the king by his own minister even before the treaty’s signing. In love for several years with Marie Mancini, Mazarin’s niece, Louis XIV had had to part from her on 22 June 1659 on the cardinal’s own orders, since reason of state demanded the Spanish marriage rather than a union with a mere “Mazarinette”; the young woman reportedly said to him as she left: “You are king, you weep, and I am leaving.” The dynastic union was consummated the following year: after a marriage by proxy celebrated at Fuenterrabía on 3 June 1660, Louis XIV married in person the Infanta Marie-Thérèse of Spain, his first cousin, both aged twenty-one, on 9 June 1660 in the church of Saint-Jean-Baptiste at Saint-Jean-de-Luz — a union sealing, on the matrimonial plane, the peace regained between the two rival houses. The royal couple then waited nearly two and a half months at Vincennes for the preparations for their entry into the capital to be completed: on 26 August 1660, Louis XIV and Marie-Thérèse made a solemn entry into Paris, from the château of Vincennes to the Louvre, acclaimed along the way by an immense crowd drawn from across the kingdom, while a great celebration was held on a square specially laid out east of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, today’s Place du Trône.
This dynastic splendour nevertheless masked an already looming political transition. Undermined for months by kidney stone disease and gout, Mazarin died on 9 March 1661 at the château of Vincennes, at the age of 58. A new will, registered three days earlier, bequeathed the bulk of his immense fortune — estimated, with no certainty, at more than two hundred million livres — to his niece Hortense Mancini and her husband the Duke of La Meilleraye, while leaving the king several diamonds, including the famous Sancy and eighteen other stones which thereafter took the name “Mazarins.” This death closed, eighteen years after that of Richelieu whom he had immediately succeeded in power, the era of cardinal-ministers that had governed France without interruption since 1624.
The very next day, 10 March 1661, Louis XIV, aged twenty-two, gathered his ministers and secretaries of state at Vincennes to announce to them, in terms that have remained famous, the end of this practice: “Monsieur, I have had you assembled here, with my ministers and secretaries of state, to tell you that, until now, I was content to let my affairs be governed by the Cardinal; it is time that I govern them myself: you will assist me with your counsel, when I ask for it.” He added, not without firmness: “The face of the theatre changes; I shall have other principles in the government of my State, in the management of my finances and in negotiations abroad than had the late Cardinal.” This declaration, more than a simple political mourning, constituted a founding act: for the first time since 1624, the kingdom of France was to be governed directly by its king, without the intermediary of a chief minister — an institutional break whose full significance the following decades were to measure.
🔍 Zoom – Louis XIV’s Absolutism: Theory and Institutions (1661-1715)
🔍 Zoom – The Education and Military Training of Louis XIV (1638-1661)
VI. 10 March 1661 – 21 December 1664: The Fall of Fouquet and the Rise of Colbert
The personal reign quickly found an opportunity to demonstrate its firmness on the financial front. As early as 8 March 1661, at the request of the dying Mazarin, Jean-Baptiste Colbert had been appointed intendant of finances, a post that allowed him to closely monitor the management of the sitting superintendent, Nicolas Fouquet, in office since 1653 and whose immense personal fortune already aroused much suspicion. This institutional rivalry, simmering for several months, found its detonator in a gesture of pride that has remained famous.
Portrait of Nicolas Fouquet: Robert Nanteuil, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
On 17 August 1661, Fouquet received Louis XIV at his newly completed château of Vaux-le-Vicomte for a celebration of unheard-of magnificence: a mock naval battle staged on the canal, a gigantic buffet prepared by the maître d’hôtel Vatel, the creation of Molière’s “Les Fâcheux” set to music by Lully, and a dazzling fireworks display illuminating the château. Fouquet, whose personal motto — “Quo non ascendam,” or “how high shall I not climb?” — adorned his coat of arms beneath a squirrel, deeply wounded the young king’s pride through this ostentation; according to tradition, Louis XIV left Vaux “with a smile on his lips, fury in his heart,” and the loss of his superintendent was decided that very evening. This evening, remembered in history as the “fatal celebration,” preceded his host’s fall by less than three weeks.
On 5 September 1661, while Fouquet had joined the king at Nantes for the Estates of Brittany, unaware that it was a trap designed to remove him from his lands and his supporters, d’Artagnan, lieutenant of the Musketeers, carried out his arrest on royal orders. Fouquet was first interned at the château of Angers. A few days later, a Fontainebleau regulation, dated 12 and 15 September, established the Royal Council of Finances and, in the same move, abolished the office of superintendent, in which Colbert now sat as intendant of finances — the definitive institutional disappearance of the post held by Fouquet, replaced by collegial management placed under the king’s direct control.
There then opened a trial lasting more than three years, conducted before a Chambre de Justice created on Colbert’s initiative. Fouquet was prosecuted there for embezzlement — misappropriation of public funds — but also for lèse-majesté, the latter charge resting notably on the fortification of the island of Belle-Île, a marquisate he had acquired and where he had installed a personal military force, presented by the prosecution as proof of a plot against the king. The trial, however, was far from consensual: in March 1662, the poet Jean de La Fontaine anonymously published his “Élégie aux nymphes de Vaux,” a poetic plea calling on the king for clemency, followed in 1663 by an “Ode au roi pour M. Fouquet” — support that cost its author the suppression of his pension by Colbert, proof that this literary protest was not taken lightly by those in power. On 20 December 1664, the Chambre de Justice delivered its verdict: by thirteen votes to nine calling for the death penalty, Fouquet was sentenced to perpetual banishment from the kingdom and confiscation of his goods. Dissatisfied with this relative clemency, Louis XIV commuted the sentence the very next day, 21 December, to perpetual detention, having the former superintendent locked up in the fortress of Pignerol, where he was to die fifteen years later. This outcome, harsher than his own judges had intended, completed the demonstration that the king henceforth meant to exercise, alone and undivided, even in matters of justice, the authority he had claimed nine months earlier.
VII. 1664 – Late 1667: Colbertism at Work, Companies, Manufactories and the First Splendours of Versailles
Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Colbert: Philippe de Champaigne, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Now the undisputed master of royal finances, Colbert could henceforth fully deploy his mercantilist policy. On 27 August 1664, a royal declaration created, on his initiative, the French East India Company: endowed with a capital of fifteen million livres and established at Lorient, it received for fifty years a monopoly on trade and navigation in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, from the Cape of Good Hope to the Strait of Magellan, as well as the perpetual concession of Madagascar. That same year saw the creation of the French West India Company, endowed with a contribution of 4.5 million livres and devoted mainly to the sugar trade — a less durable enterprise, unable to secure its monopoly and dissolved as early as 1674. This colonial division of the globe, arbitrated at the level of the Cape of Good Hope, aimed to give France instruments capable of rivalling the powerful Dutch and English companies.
This policy was accompanied by an avowed customs protectionism. On 18 September 1664, Colbert established a first national tariff of seven hundred articles, applicable across the kingdom’s entire border, intended to unify the customs regime and to protect nascent industries through a protectionism described as “educational.” This system was markedly tightened in 1667: of the fifty-seven articles retained by this second tariff, duties were doubled, striking primarily Dutch products and, to a lesser extent, English ones — a clearly offensive orientation that was to embitter trade relations with the United Provinces in the following years. On the manufacturing front, Colbert had already acquired, on 6 June 1662, the Hôtel des Gobelins, for 40,775 livres, with a view to establishing there a manufactory placed under the direction of the painter Charles Le Brun; letters patent of 1667 formalised its status under the name Royal Manufactory of Crown Furniture, which brought together goldsmiths, cabinetmakers, painters and sculptors tasked with furnishing the royal residences well beyond tapestry alone — an institution that Louis XIV came to visit in person on 15 October 1667, officially consecrating its new status.
Colbertism, however, was not limited to trade or manufactories: it also invested in the scientific field and in land development. On 22 December 1666, Colbert convened, for its first session in the king’s library in Paris, the Royal Academy of Sciences, bringing together mathematicians, astronomers and physicists tasked with advancing the sciences and advising the state — an institution to which the Paris Observatory was soon attached, its site acquired as early as 7 March 1667. On the front of great public works, a royal edict of 7 October 1666 authorised the digging of the Canal du Midi, intended to link the Atlantic to the Mediterranean to develop the grain trade, under the direction of the engineer Pierre-Paul Riquet; work on the feeder canals began in January 1667, followed in April by the construction of the Saint-Ferréol dam, the largest such structure ever undertaken in France until then.
Alongside this economic and scientific work, Colbert, now superintendent of Buildings, set in motion the construction of the residence that was to become the symbol of the reign. As early as 1661, Louis XIV had called upon the very artists who had built Vaux-le-Vicomte — the architect Louis Le Vau, the painter-decorator Charles Le Brun and the gardener André Le Nôtre — to transform Versailles, with Le Nôtre beginning the extension of the gardens from that date; Le Vau later added the park’s menagerie (1663-1665) and the Grotto of Thetis (1664-1666). This still-modest transformation received its first great staging on 7 to 13 May 1664, during the Pleasures of the Enchanted Isle: six hundred guests attended, in the gardens sumptuously arranged by Le Nôtre, entertainments devised by the decorator Carlo Vigarani and the Duke of Saint-Aignan, officially dedicated to Anne of Austria and Marie-Thérèse but in reality conceived in honour of the royal favourite, Louise de La Vallière; inspired by Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, the celebration saw Louis XIV himself play the role of the knight Roger, and marked the first collaboration between Molière and Lully under royal patronage — the occasion, on 12 May, for the creation of a first three-act version of Tartuffe. Finally, in 1667, the digging of the Grand Canal was decided, though work would not begin until the following year, thus completing, on the eve of the War of Devolution, the foundations of a project destined to durably transform the landscape and the representation of royal power.
🔍 Zoom – Versailles, Palace of the Sun King (1661-1715)
🔍 Zoom – The Arts and Sciences under Louis XIV (1661-1715)
🔍 Zoom – Colbertism: Manufactories, the Navy and Finances (1661-1683)
VIII. 17 September 1665 – 2 May 1668: The War of Devolution, Louis XIV’s First Conquest, and the Lesson of the Triple Alliance
The death of Philip IV of Spain, on 17 September 1665, Louis XIV’s father-in-law, opened the succession in favour of his son Charles II, born of a second marriage, and gave the King of France the opportunity for his first offensive war. In the name of his wife Marie-Thérèse, daughter of Philip IV’s first marriage, Louis XIV invoked the right of devolution, a private custom in use in Brabant according to which the children of a first union inherited real property before those of a second, even a daughter. This argument, already sketched in response to an opposing treatise by the Flemish jurist Pierre Stockmans published in early 1666, was developed in 1667 in the Treatise on the Rights of the Most Christian Queen over Various States of the Spanish Monarchy, written on royal order by the jurist Antoine Bilain with Amable de Bourzeis, which added that Marie-Thérèse’s renunciation of her rights, agreed to in the Treaty of the Pyrenees, was null for want of payment of the 500,000-écu dowry stipulated in return. Meanwhile, on 20 January 1666, Anne of Austria died at the Louvre, at the age of 65, of breast cancer, with Louis XIV collapsed at her bedside; her death closed, a few months before the opening of hostilities, the generation that had carried the regency and the Fronde at the start of the reign.
Armed with this justification, Louis XIV launched the military offensive as early as the spring of 1667. On 24 May, Turenne crossed the border of the Spanish Netherlands at the head of about 35,000 men, methodically taking Charleroi on 2 June, Tournai on 27 June, then Douai in July. The campaign culminated with the Siege of Lille, from 18 to 28 August: against a Spanish garrison of about 4,200 men and a relief force of 8,000 to 12,000 men, Louis XIV had raised an army of 50,000 men; the engineer Vauban, wounded in the cheek during the operation, won there the first of his great siege victories. Lille capitulated on 28 August, the very day Louis XIV made a triumphant entry through the Porte des Malades — twelve strongholds were conquered in Flanders in total during this campaign.
The Siege of Lille by Louis XIV’s Army, 1667: Adam Frans van der Meulen, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The following winter, the war shifted to an entirely different theatre. On 2 February 1668, Louis XIV left Saint-Germain to join the army of the Prince of Condé, which that same day crossed the border of Franche-Comté with 19,000 men, causing total surprise among the Comtois. Within mere days, Pesmes, Marnay, Arbois, Poligny and Bletterans fell; Besançon surrendered without a fight on 7 February, Dole capitulated after only four days of siege on the 14th, and Fort Gray fell on the 19th. After only seventeen days, the whole of Franche-Comté was occupied, and Louis XIV returned to Saint-Germain on 24 February — a demonstration of power as swift as it was dazzling, in sharp contrast with the slowness of the Flemish sieges.
This double conquest alarmed neighbouring powers enough to provoke an unexpected diplomatic response. On 23 January 1668, the United Provinces and England, soon joined by Sweden on 25 April, concluded at The Hague the Triple Alliance, negotiated by the Dutch pensionary Johan de Witt and the English envoy William Temple, combining a defensive pact with a commitment to force France and Spain to peace, by arms if necessary. Faced with this coalition, Louis XIV resolved to negotiate: on 2 May 1668, the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, signed by the Marquis de Croissy — Charles Colbert, the minister’s brother — for France and by the Count of Bergeyck for Spain, ended the conflict. France restored Franche-Comté to Spain but kept the twelve strongholds conquered in Flanders by Turenne, including Lille, Tournai, Douai, Charleroi and Armentières — a real territorial gain, but far short of initial ambitions, and a diplomatic humiliation that Louis XIV, forced to bow before a coalition led by the United Provinces, was soon to seek to erase.
IX. May 1668 – Late 1678: The Franco-Dutch War, the Invasion of 1672, and the Death of Turenne
The humiliation of the Triple Alliance called for its revenge. Convinced that the United Provinces had orchestrated the 1668 coalition to thwart his designs on the Spanish Netherlands, Louis XIV set about isolating them diplomatically, one by one. On 1 June 1670, he concluded with Charles II of England the Secret Treaty of Dover: the English king undertook to declare himself Catholic at an opportune moment and to break with the United Provinces, supplying 60 warships and 4,000 soldiers for the coming war, in exchange for a subsidy of two million livres tournois paid by France. This manoeuvre, which turned one of the very members of the Triple Alliance, completed the preparation of the ground for a large-scale offensive.
This offensive opened with unprecedented force. After the declaration of war of 6 April 1672, the French army, some 120,000 strong, crossed the Rhine at the Tolhuis ford on 12 June 1672: a main body of 60,000 men under Louis XIV and Turenne, preceded by a vanguard commanded by Condé, who was severely wounded in the wrist while forcing the crossing — the only wound of his entire military career. Faced with this mass, the Prince of Orange could muster only 20,000 men; three of the seven provinces of the Netherlands — Utrecht, Guelders and Overijssel — fell within mere weeks. Cornered, the Dutch then resorted to an ultimate weapon: from the summer of 1672, they opened their sluices and breached their dikes to flood a broad strip of land between the Zuiderzee and the Biesbosch, creating the Dutch Water Line that protected Amsterdam and the heart of the country — a French attempt to cross the ice on the night of 27 to 28 December failed, moreover, when the thaw set in. This year, remembered in Dutch memory as the “rampjaar,” the year of disaster, also saw an internal political revolution: on 20 August 1672, Johan de Witt, Grand Pensionary of Holland held solely responsible for the debacle, was murdered at The Hague along with his brother Cornelis by a crowd of Orangist partisans, opening the way to power for William of Orange, whose complicity in the lynching was never proven but who subsequently obstructed any prosecution of the ringleaders.
Louis XIV Crossing the Rhine, 12 June 1672: Adam Frans van der Meulen, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
What was meant to remain a war confined to the United Provinces rapidly widened to the whole of Europe. As early as 1673, Emperor Leopold I, Spain and Brandenburg joined the United Provinces in an anti-French coalition, forcing Louis XIV to withdraw his troops from conquered Dutch territory to concentrate his effort on the Rhine and Franche-Comté.
The year 1674 concentrated the most striking episodes of this new phase. From 25 April to 22 May, French troops, 15,000 to 20,000 strong under the command of the Duke of Enghien, Condé’s son, laid siege to Besançon; thanks to a method of attacking strongholds devised by Vauban, the city capitulated after twenty-seven days, this time sealing the definitive annexation of Franche-Comté to France, unlike the fleeting conquest of 1668. A few months later, on 11 August 1674, Condé fought at Seneffe the bloodiest battle of the entire war: at the head of 45,000 men, he faced the 60,000-strong Austro-Spanish-Dutch army of William of Orange, fighting three times over and having three horses killed under him; the losses were enormous — 3,000 dead and 4,000 wounded on the French side, up to 8,000 to 11,000 on the other — to the point that the Marquise de Sévigné wrote: “We have lost so much in this victory that, were it not for the Te Deum and a few flags carried to Notre-Dame, we would believe we had lost the battle.” It was Condé’s last great battle, after which he withdrew from service.
It was on the Rhenish theatre that the war next cost France its greatest captain: on 27 July 1675, while inspecting enemy lines commanded by the imperial general Raimondo Montecuccoli near Salzbach, in Alsace, Turenne was killed instantly by a cannonball. His own adversary was reportedly overcome by the news, declaring: “There died today a man who did honour to humanity.” The conflict continued for several more years without a general of such stature, gradually bogging down on its various fronts until the first peace negotiations opened at Nijmegen from 1676.
Death of Turenne at the Battle of Salzbach, 1675: Anonymous (17th century), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
X. Late 1678 – Late 1679: The Peace of Nijmegen, the Peak of French Power, and the Title of Louis the Great
The negotiations opened at Nijmegen led, in the summer of 1678, to a series of treaties that closed the Franco-Dutch War with a settlement carefully differentiated according to adversary. On 10 August 1678, France signed with the United Provinces a treaty of peace and a treaty of trade and navigation: Colbert obtained the repeal of the prohibitive customs tariff of 1667, which had been ruining Dutch trade, as well as the abolition of the droit d’aubaine, while the United Provinces, whose territory had never been durably threatened, recovered all their strongholds without ceding anything. This calculated generosity, intended to detach the principal adversary from the rest of the coalition, contrasted with the severity reserved for Spain.
The signing of the Dutch peace did not, however, put an immediate end to the fighting. On 14 August 1678, barely four days after the Nijmegen agreement, William of Orange attacked near Mons the quarters of Marshal de Luxembourg, who had been besieging the city since 18 May in the hope of taking it before concluding with Spain: the Battle of Saint-Denis was long and fierce, leaving the French masters of the field except for the abbey of the same name, but forced Luxembourg to lift the siege of Mons — the last, and almost absurd, clash of a war already officially over for one of the belligerents. The negotiations with Spain, thus hastened, resulted in the treaty of 17 September 1678: France obtained the definitive possession of Franche-Comté, as well as Ypres, Poperinge, Cassel, Warneton and Bailleul in Flanders, Aire and Saint-Omer in Artois, Valenciennes, Bouchain, Condé, Cambrai and Maubeuge in Hainaut, in exchange for restoring strongholds conquered ten years earlier such as Charleroi, Binche, Ath, Oudenarde and Courtrai. The kingdom thus reached, in the Jura as in Flanders, near-definitive borders.
The congress closed on 5 February 1679 with a final treaty with Emperor Leopold I: Louis XIV ceded Philippsbourg there but kept Freiburg im Breisgau, a strategic stronghold overlooking the right bank of the Rhine, and undertook to restore Lorraine to Duke Charles V — a commitment left unfulfilled, the duke having refused the conditions imposed, so that the duchy remained occupied by French troops. This threefold settlement, thirty years after the Peace of Westphalia which it had come to confirm and extend, marked the undisputed summit of French power in Europe: in recognition of this success, the city of Paris awarded Louis XIV, around 1679-1680, the title of “Louis the Great,” while Marshal François d’Aubusson de La Feuillade commissioned, from 1679 and at his own expense, an equestrian statue of the king intended to commemorate the victory — a project that was to give rise to the Place des Victoires, but whose execution, entrusted to the sculptor Martin Desjardins, was not completed until 1686.
The Inauguration of the Statue of Louis XIV, Place des Victoires, 1686: Anonymous (Musée Carnavalet), CC0 https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en, via Wikimedia Commons
XI. 1679 – 15 August 1684: The Policy of Reunions, Strasbourg, the Dragonnades and the Truce of Ratisbon
Strengthened by this dominant position, Louis XIV set about methodically rounding out his borders by means less glorious than open war. From 1679, he instituted chambres de réunion, tribunals tasked with tracing the former “dependencies” of territories ceded to him by the treaties of Westphalia, Aix-la-Chapelle and Nijmegen, in order to legally pronounce their reunion with the crown. The chamber of Metz, established on 23 October 1679, thus annexed between April 1680 and March 1681 Sarrelouis, Sarrebourg, Pont-à-Mousson, the counties of Vaudémont and Chiny, Givet, Saarbrücken, Bitche and almost the entire Duchy of Luxembourg, presented as dependencies of the Three Bishoprics; that of Besançon decreed the reunion of the county of Montbéliard between September 1679 and August 1680; the sovereign council of Breisach finally proclaimed, on 9 August 1680, the king’s sovereignty over the whole of Alsace, including the free city of Strasbourg.
This last claim reached its conclusion the following year. On 28 September 1681, an army of 30,000 men led by Louvois, secretary of state for War, invested Strasbourg; without giving battle, the magistrate and municipal council negotiated swiftly and signed the capitulation on 30 September 1681. On 23 October following, Louis XIV and Marie-Thérèse made a solemn entry there, an episode regarded by many historians as the summit of the Sun King’s power in Europe.
The Entry of the King of France into Strasbourg, 1681: Bibliothèque nationale de France (printed in Nuremberg), CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/, via Wikimedia Commons
That same year, another policy, of a religious nature this time, saw its first developments: in Poitou, the intendant René de Marillac, encouraged by Louvois, inaugurated the practice of the dragonnades, forcibly billeting dragoons of the royal army with Huguenot families, with implicit permission to mistreat the inhabitants and plunder their belongings — new converts being exempt from this burden, the measure was openly intended to provoke conversions. Within a few months, the priests of Poitou recorded 38,000 conversions, while the province, ruined, saw its inhabitants fleeing to England or Holland; the indignation aroused throughout Protestant Europe finally forced Louvois to recall Marillac from his post.
A Dragonnade Scene in France, circa 1681-1685: Anonymous (Rijksmuseum), CC0 https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en, via Wikimedia Commons
These unilateral annexations eventually provoked an armed response, within a European context that France skilfully exploited. During the summer of 1683, while Emperor Leopold I saw Vienna besieged by the Ottomans, Louis XIV observed a calculated neutrality, forbidding his officers to serve Austria and remaining deaf to the appeals of Pope Innocent XI to join the Holy League; some historians even attribute to him a role in the revolt of the emperor’s Hungarian subjects, which helped provoke the Ottoman intervention. Vienna was saved only on 12 September by the arrival of the King of Poland John III Sobieski, leaving the emperor exhausted by this eastern peril at the very moment when France was intensifying its pressure in the west. On 26 October 1683, Spain declared war on France, opening the War of the Reunions; its troops, too weak, could offer no serious resistance to the French, who seized Courtrai and Dixmude as early as November 1683. From 29 April to 3 June 1684, Louis XIV, in person and assisted by Vauban, led the siege of the fortress of Luxembourg, defended by 2,500 men, which capitulated after a month of investment. This show of force finally convinced the emperor and the King of Spain to recognise, through the Truce of Ratisbon of 15 August 1684, the policy of the fait accompli: for twenty years, they left the King of France all the territories seized through the reunions policy since 1679, including Strasbourg and Luxembourg — a diplomatic consecration of a reign then at its territorial zenith, though its religious wing, already tested by the dragonnades of Poitou, was about to undergo a far more radical turn.
🔍 Zoom – Court Life at Versailles: Etiquette and the King’s Daily Routine (1682-1715)
🔍 Zoom – The Great Confinement: Beggars, Vagrants and Roma under Louis XIV (1656-1693)
XII. July 1683 – December 1685: The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the Religious Turning Point of the Reign
This turning point was first announced in the king’s private life. On 30 July 1683, Queen Marie-Thérèse died at Versailles, at the age of 44, of an infected abscess on her arm; Louis XIV reportedly remarked on this occasion: “That is the first sorrow she has caused me.” On the night of 9 to 10 October 1683, the king secretly married, in the chapel of the château of Versailles, Françoise d’Aubigné, Marquise de Maintenon — a morganatic union with no official record, blessed by Father La Chaize or by the Archbishop of Paris Harlay de Champvallon according to different sources, in the presence of only the four necessary witnesses. This influential devout woman, whose ascendancy over the king never ceased to grow, is traditionally linked by historiography to the religious hardening that was to follow, though her exact role in the decision cannot be established with certainty.
This hardening found its legal conclusion two years later. On 18 October 1685, Louis XIV signed at Fontainebleau the edict that bears his name, purely and simply revoking the 1598 Edict of Nantes: drafted in part by Chancellor Le Tellier with royal approval, this twelve-article text banned all Reformed worship, ordered the demolition of temples — including that of Charenton, the kingdom’s principal Protestant place of worship — and the closure of Reformed schools, ordered pastors to leave the kingdom within a fortnight or convert, made Catholic baptism and marriage compulsory for all subjects, and simultaneously forbade any emigration to ordinary Protestants. Louis XIV thus believed he had achieved, with a stroke of the pen, the religious unity of the kingdom that the Peace of Alès had only imperfectly realised half a century earlier. This conviction was relayed with fanfare by the clergy: in his funeral oration for Chancellor Le Tellier, on 25 January 1686, Bossuet exclaimed: “Let us raise acclamations to the heavens… and let us say to this new Constantine, to this new Theodosius, to this new Marcian, to this new Charlemagne: you have strengthened the faith; you have exterminated the heretics; it is the worthy work of your reign.”
The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV: Jan Luyken, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Reality quickly belied this ambition. Despite the ban on emigration, which exposed fugitives caught in the act to the galleys for men or the convent for women, about 200,000 Huguenots — nearly a quarter of the kingdom’s Protestant population — secretly reached the United Provinces, Switzerland, Germany or England in the months following the revocation. In November 1685, the Great Elector of Brandenburg published the Edict of Potsdam, officially opening his states to Huguenot refugees; about 20,000 of them settled there permanently, contributing to Prussia’s economic growth while illustrating, by contrast, the loss that this Protestant Refuge represented for France — craftsmen, merchants and scholars leaving the kingdom at the very moment when its religious policy was finishing off any goodwill among the Protestant powers of Europe, already stirred up by the policy of the reunions.
🔍 Zoom – The Love Life of Louis XIV: Mistresses and a Secret Marriage (1660-1715)
XIII. 1686-1690: The War of the League of Augsburg, the Sack of the Palatinate and the Glorious Revolution
The indignation aroused by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and by a decade of the policy of the reunions eventually crystallised a new coalition against France. On 9 July 1686, at Augsburg, Emperor Leopold I, Sweden, Bavaria and the dukes of Saxony formed the League of Augsburg, a defensive alliance joined on 2 September by the Elector Palatine himself. Louis XIV, far from retreating, then chose to carry the war onto a new front: in the name of the allodial rights claimed by his sister-in-law Elisabeth-Charlotte of Bavaria, known as Liselotte, over the inheritance of her recently deceased brother, Elector Charles II of the Palatinate, he laid claim to the Palatinate. He soon added a second matter: on 24 September 1688, a royal manifesto demanded from the emperor, in addition to the Palatine lands, recognition of Cardinal von Fürstenberg, the French candidate, as archbishop-elector of Cologne, against the claimant backed by Vienna and Rome. The very next day, the French army opened hostilities: from 27 September to 29-30 October 1688, Marshal Duras and Vauban, at the head of 30,000 men placed under the nominal command of the Grand Dauphin, laid siege to the fortress of Philippsbourg, the war’s first military operation, which capitulated after more than a month of resistance.
This war began with an episode of a brutality that left a lasting mark on memory. Between 16 February and 31 May 1689, on the orders of the minister of War Louvois, French armies carried out the Sack of the Palatinate: Heidelberg was burned on 2 March, Mannheim on the 8th, then Frankenthal, Worms and Speyer, whose thousand-year-old cathedral was destroyed; on 31 May, Whit Sunday, Speyer, Worms and Oppenheim burned simultaneously on the order of General Duras. This scorched-earth policy, intended to deprive the enemy of any base for reconquest, aroused international indignation relayed by numerous pamphlets, and contributed, according to several historians, to the emergence of a German national sentiment born of hatred for France.
At the very moment this disaster was unfolding, a second, more distant event was to considerably widen the conflict. On 5 November 1688, William of Orange, stadtholder of the United Provinces, landed at Torbay in England, where the Catholic king James II had made himself unpopular through his religious policy; on 22 December 1688, James II fled to France, where Louis XIV offered him hospitality at the château of Saint-Germain-en-Laye.
William of Orange Landing at Torbay, November 1688: Joseph Mallord William Turner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
This Glorious Revolution consecrated in February 1689 the joint accession of William III and Mary II, tipping England into the camp of the League of Augsburg and definitively transforming a continental conflict into a pan-European war — the Nine Years’ War.
The year 1690 saw France simultaneously win its finest successes of the war. On 1 July, Marshal de Luxembourg, at the head of 40,000 men, crushed at Fleurus the Austro-Spanish-Anglo-Dutch coalition of General Waldeck through a vast enveloping manoeuvre, losing only 3,600 men against more than 20,000 enemy losses, including 8,000 prisoners and 49 captured cannon. Nine days later, on 10 July, Admiral Tourville won off Cap Béveziers (Beachy Head) the finest naval victory of the reign, his 77 ships routing an Anglo-Dutch fleet of 57 ships without French loss. That same month, however, James II’s cause suffered a decisive setback in Ireland: on 10-12 July, at the Battle of the Boyne, William III’s 36,000 men, commanded by Marshal Schomberg, crushed the 23,000 Franco-Jacobite soldiers, including 7,000 French, forcing James II into definitive exile — dazzling continental successes on one side, a bitter dynastic failure on the other, together summing up the contrasting fortunes of a war still far from over.
XIV. 1691-1697: The Attrition of the Nine Years’ War and the Peace of Ryswick
The following years confirmed French superiority on the ground, without ever managing to translate it into a decisive victory — at the price, however, of a renewal of the command and an unprecedented internal catastrophe. On 16 July 1691, Louvois, minister of War for nearly twenty years and architect of the Sack of the Palatinate, died suddenly at Versailles, at the age of 50; his son, the Marquis de Barbezieux, succeeded him that very day at the head of the War department, continuing a ministerial dynasty begun by his grandfather Michel Le Tellier. From 25 May to 30 June 1692, Vauban personally directed, in the king’s presence, the first Siege of Namur: the city capitulated on 5 June, but the citadel, tenaciously defended by the Dutch engineer Menno van Coehoorn, did not surrender until 30 June. Almost simultaneously, from 29 May to 3 June 1692, Admiral Tourville, tasked with covering a planned landing in England, had to engage his 44 ships against an Anglo-Dutch fleet of 89: after a first engagement of twelve hours that remained indecisive off Barfleur, twelve damaged French ships had to take refuge in the roadstead of Saint-Vaast-la-Hougue, where they were burned by the enemy, while three others burned at Cherbourg — the disaster of La Hougue, which cost a total of fifteen ships of the line and forced Louis XIV to permanently abandon any plan to invade England.
The Destruction of the Soleil Royal at the Battle of La Hougue, 1692: Adriaen van Diest, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
On the land front, Luxembourg continued his string of successes. On 3 August 1692, he repelled at Steenkerque a surprise attack by William III, in a battle that caused about 20,000 casualties on both sides; on 29 July 1693, he inflicted on him a fresh defeat at Neerwinden (or the Battle of Landen), one of the bloodiest engagements of the century. These three consecutive victories — Fleurus, Steenkerque, Neerwinden — finally convinced the United Provinces, England and the Empire to open, from 1694, separate negotiations with France, despite the numerical superiority the coalition still enjoyed.
These same years, however, saw the kingdom struck by a demographic catastrophe out of all proportion to the losses on the battlefields. Triggered by a harsh winter followed by almost continuous rains in 1692, and worsened the following year, the Great Famine of 1693-1694 caused the French population to fall from 22.25 to 20.75 million inhabitants according to the historian François Lebrun, or about a million and a half deaths; a contemporary witness reported that “a third of the people died in almost every parish,” the inhabitants being reduced to “grazing on grass” and “eating nettles.” This crisis, worsened by the weight of wartime taxation, forced the crown to create, as early as 1695, a new tax, the capitation, striking in principle every class of society.
This diplomatic shift nevertheless occurred at a moment of weakness for the French command. On 4 January 1695, Marshal de Luxembourg died at 66 of pneumonia contracted on returning from his campaigns, depriving the French army of its most victorious general since Turenne. William III immediately seized on this loss: in 1695, he personally led the second Siege of Namur, and on 27 June, at the head of 400 Anglo-Dutch grenadiers, he took the covered way of the stronghold by storm, forcing its surrender — a symbolic revenge that erased the defeat of 1692 and illustrated the reversal of the balance of power at the end of the conflict.
Exhausted by eleven years of continuous war, the belligerent powers finally resolved on peace. On 20 September 1697, the Treaties of Ryswick were signed between France, the United Provinces, England and Spain — a final agreement following on 30 October with Emperor Leopold I. Louis XIV recognised William III there as the legitimate King of England, definitively turning the page on the Jacobite cause; he restored Lorraine, the Palatinate, Catalonia and almost all the strongholds acquired through the policy of the reunions, keeping only Sarrelouis, Longwy and Strasbourg, and returned to Spain most of the Spanish Netherlands, including the fortress of Luxembourg. The United Provinces also obtained commercial advantages in French ports and the right of garrison in several Spanish strongholds in the Netherlands. After the peak of Nijmegen and the boldness of the reunions, Ryswick thus marked a clear territorial retreat for France — the first tangible sign that the Sun King’s power, on the eve of the reign’s last great conflict, had reached its limits.
XV. 1698 – Autumn 1701: The Crisis of the Spanish Succession, the Will of Charles II, and the Reconstitution of the Grand Alliance
Peace barely signed at Ryswick, Europe found itself confronted with a far weightier question: that of the succession of the King of Spain Charles II, childless and in failing health. To prevent it from degenerating into general war, France, England and the United Provinces secretly negotiated, on 11 October 1698, a first Partition Treaty at The Hague, designating as principal heir the young Joseph Ferdinand of Bavaria, aged six, who would receive Spain, the Indies and the Spanish Netherlands, while the Dauphin of France would content himself with Italian territories and Archduke Charles of Austria with the Duchy of Milan. This arrangement collapsed on 6 February 1699, when the young Bavarian prince died unexpectedly in Brussels, forcing the same powers to negotiate a second Partition Treaty, signed in London on 25 March 1700: Archduke Charles would this time inherit Spain and the Indies, the Dauphin receiving Naples, Sicily and Lorraine, with the Duke of Lorraine compensated with Milan.
These elaborate arrangements were swept aside by a unilateral Spanish decision. On 2 October 1700, Charles II signed in Madrid a will bequeathing the whole of the Spanish monarchy to Philip of Anjou, Louis XIV’s second grandson, on the express condition that the crowns of France and Spain never be united; the Duke of Berry, then Archduke Charles, were designated as subsidiary heirs in case of refusal. Charles II died on 1 November 1700; the news reached Madrid the next day and reached Fontainebleau on 9 November, placing Louis XIV before an agonising dilemma: honour the partition treaty signed with England and the United Provinces, or accept a will that offered his family the whole of the Spanish empire at the almost certain price of a new war. On 16 November 1700, after his council had deliberated, Louis XIV chose to accept the will and proclaimed his grandson King of Spain under the name Philip V — a decision to which tradition, popularised by Voltaire in his Siècle de Louis XIV nearly half a century later, attaches the famous remark: “There are no more Pyrenees.” From December 1700, Louis XIV also had letters patent registered with the Parlement of Paris maintaining Philip V in his rights as a French prince despite his accession to the Spanish throne — a gesture which, by leaving open the possibility of a future union of the two crowns, contradicted in spirit the very clause of Charles II’s will that forbade it, and immediately alarmed England and the United Provinces.
The young king set off at once to take possession of his kingdom: having entered Spanish territory on 22 January 1701, Philip V made his triumphant entry into Madrid on 18 February following. That same month, however, Louis XIV committed a first act that was to reopen hostilities with the United Provinces: at the request of the Spanish council of regency, he had French troops occupy the barrier strongholds in the Spanish Netherlands, until then garrisoned by Dutch troops under a bilateral treaty of 1698 — an occupation notified to the States General as early as 7 February and vigorously denounced by a Holland that demanded, in vain, the return of its garrisons. A second provocation, commercial in nature this time, was added on 27 August 1701: Philip V granted Louis XIV the Asiento, the monopoly on supplying slaves to Spain’s American colonies, entrusted to the banker Antoine Crozat through the Compagnie de Guinée — a direct blow to English commercial interests, regularly cited among the major causes of the coming conflict. These initial provocations were soon followed by a third, even more spectacular: on the death of James II, which occurred on 16 September 1701 at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Louis XIV immediately recognised his son as King of England under the name James III, in direct violation of the commitment made at Ryswick to recognise William III. Nine days earlier, on 7 September 1701, England, the United Provinces and the Holy Roman Empire, soon joined by Portugal, had already signed at The Hague the treaty founding the Grand Alliance, a coalition intended to contain Louis XIV’s ambitions — the recognition of James III added merely one more motive for hostility. Within a matter of months, the acceptance of the Spanish will had thus ruined the fragile balance of Ryswick and reconstituted, identically to the League of Augsburg fifteen years earlier, the coalition that was to confront France in the reign’s last and longest conflict.
XVI. 1702-1707: The Annus Horribilis, the Disasters of Höchstädt, Ramillies and Turin
The Grand Alliance concluded at The Hague was not long in translating into a formal declaration: on 13 May 1702, England, the United Provinces and the emperor solemnly declared war on France and Spain, opening the reign’s last and longest conflict. The coalition then continued to widen: Denmark joined it shortly afterward, then Portugal in 1703, before Duke Victor Amadeus II of Savoy, until then an ally of Louis XIV, also switched his alliance in 1703 to join the Austrian camp — a defection that was to cost France dearly on the Italian theatre. Faced with this reconstituted coalition, even larger in scale than that of the League of Augsburg, the kingdom had to fight simultaneously in Germany, in the Netherlands, in Italy and in Spain, without a general of the calibre of Turenne or Condé to coordinate this scattered effort.
The first setbacks came as early as 1702, on two distinct theatres. On the night of 31 January to 1 February, Prince Eugene of Savoy attempted to surprise, in a night raid, the French garrison of Cremona, in Lombardy: imperial grenadiers, infiltrated through an aqueduct and let into the town by a complicit priest, seized a gate and captured Marshal Villeroy in his own quarters; only the fierce resistance of the Irish regiments in Louis XIV’s service repelled the assault and kept the city, at the cost of Villeroy’s captivity until October. A few months later, on 23 October 1702, in the bay of Vigo, in Galicia, the Anglo-Dutch fleet of Admiral Rooke destroyed the Franco-Spanish fleet of admirals Château-Renault and Velasco, tasked with escorting the American treasure convoy — a cargo of gold, silver and jewels estimated at nearly fifty million écus, part of which fell into the victors’ hands, dealing a severe blow to Philip V’s war finances in the very first year of the conflict.
The first major land disaster then occurred on the German theatre. On 13 August 1704, near the village of Blindheim on the banks of the Danube, in Bavaria, the Franco-Bavarian army of Marshal de Tallard, about 60,000 strong, faced the 52,000 Anglo-Austrian troops jointly commanded by the Duke of Marlborough and Prince Eugene of Savoy, at the Battle of Höchstädt, also known as the Battle of Blenheim. Catching their ill-prepared adversary by surprise, the two allied generals broke through the French centre, cutting off the armies of Tallard and Marsin from each other, before driving the Franco-Bavarian troops back toward the river; Tallard himself was taken prisoner along with twenty-three infantry battalions and four regiments of dragoons, while the Allies mourned about 12,000 losses for a decisive victory. This defeat, the first of such magnitude suffered by Louis XIV in decades, put an end to the myth of French military invincibility and cost the kingdom its Bavarian ally.
The Battle of Höchstädt (Blenheim), 1704: J. M. Jopling, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The year 1706 brought a twofold catastrophe on two theatres at once. On 23 May, at Ramillies, in Brabant, the army of Marshal de Villeroy, 60,000 strong, was routed by Marlborough’s 62,000 Allies: a feint on the right wing preceded a massive cavalry charge against the French left wing, which broke the entire line in under two hours and cost about 13,000 French losses and fifty cannon, against only 3,600 on the allied side. Villeroy, who refused to tender his resignation despite the scale of the disaster, had to be entreated by Louis XIV himself, who received him with a remark that has remained famous: “Monsieur le Maréchal, one is no longer fortunate at our age.” His disgrace, final, made way for Duke Louis-Joseph de Vendôme, who officially took command of the army of Flanders on 4 August 1706; the defeat had meanwhile cost France most of the Spanish Netherlands west of the Meuse and north of the Sambre. At the same time, on the Italian front, French troops had since 14 May been besieging the capital of the Duke of Savoy; but on 7 September 1706, Prince Eugene and Victor Amadeus II, now his ally, lifted the Siege of Turin, inflicting heavy losses on the besiegers and forcing France to evacuate Piedmont entirely — a Te Deum was sung at Turin in honour of the two liberators. Within mere months, this twofold catastrophe had thus ruined two of the reign’s principal conquests.
The Battle of Ramillies, 23 May 1706: Adolf van der Laan, CC0 https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en, via Wikimedia Commons
Only the Spanish theatre offered, the following year, a counterpoint to this string of setbacks. On 25 April 1707, at Almanza, in the kingdom of Valencia, Marshal Berwick — the natural son of James II Stuart who had entered French service — commanded a Franco-Spanish army of about 25,000 men against an Anglo-Portuguese force reinforced by Dutch, Germans and French Huguenots, under the Earl of Galway, himself a Huguenot exile in English service; the battle was remembered as one of the very few in history where English troops were commanded by a Frenchman and French troops by an Englishman. A decisive Franco-Spanish cavalry charge against the weakened Anglo-Portuguese lines inflicted more than 12,000 losses on the Allies and allowed the reconquest of Valencia and then Catalonia, ruining Austrian hopes in Spain and durably consolidating Philip V on his throne. This isolated success could not, however, offset, on the scale of the European conflict, the magnitude of the disasters accumulated since 1704.
XVII. 1708-1709: Oudenarde, the Fall of Lille and the Great Winter
The year 1708 saw the French command itself become paralysed at the worst possible moment. On 5 July, Vendôme and Bourgogne seized Ghent and Bruges by surprise, a swift success that seemed to reopen the Flanders campaign for the kingdom. Six days later, on 11 July, at Oudenarde, the army of the Two Crowns, about 100,000 Franco-Spanish strong, faced Marlborough’s 90,000 Allies, reinforced by Prince Eugene of Savoy; but the French command, divided between Duke Vendôme and Duke Bourgogne, the king’s grandson, had for weeks been torn over the strategy to follow — Vendôme wishing to strike toward Huy, Bourgogne preferring to strike at Ghent, Bruges and Oudenarde. This discord was paid for dearly on the battlefield: Bourgogne launched a determined counterattack against Vendôme’s advice, then, when the latter asked his permission to commit the second wing to exploit an opportunity, refused it. The defeat, which cost the French army about 6,000 killed or wounded and 7,000 prisoners against about 3,000 allied losses, consummated a definitive rift between the two generals: Louis XIV recalled Vendôme to Versailles and excluded him from any command until 1710, letting him lose much of his support at court, while the French army remained without coherent direction at the very moment the enemy was carrying the war to the heart of the kingdom.
The Duke of Marlborough at the Battle of Oudenarde, 1708: John Wootton, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
This advance, however, met unexpected resistance. From 13 August to 9 December 1708, Prince Eugene and Marlborough laid siege to Lille, a stronghold fortified by Vauban, with 35,000 besiegers backed by 120 heavy cannon and 80 mortars; facing them, Marshal Boufflers, arriving on 28 July at the head of a garrison of 16,000 men and 159 cannon, organised a fierce defence. The city capitulated on 22 October, but Boufflers withdrew into the citadel with 4,500 men as early as 25 October and held out there for another month and a half, until the exhaustion of food and ammunition, on 9 December. This siege cost both camps dearly — 13,000 to 16,000 killed or wounded on the allied side, against 7,000 on the French side — but Boufflers’s resistance, by delaying the allied advance on Paris by a full year, turned a territorial defeat into a defensive success celebrated as such by the entire court. The fall of the citadel, however, closed off the entire gain of the previous summer: Ghent capitulated on 30 December after six days of trenches, and Bruges was evacuated on 2 January 1709, restoring to the Allies, in the depths of winter, all the strongholds seized by surprise six months earlier.
The kingdom, however, hardly had time to recover from this siege before being struck by a catastrophe of an entirely different order. From January to March 1709, a “great winter” of unprecedented severity descended on France: the temperature dropped to -23°C in Paris, the Seine froze completely, and supplying the capital became impossible for three months. According to the historian Marcel Lachiver, this episode caused about 100,000 deaths from cold between January and March, before a second wave of excess mortality, linked to malnutrition, struck during the summer and autumn, followed by a third, epidemic wave that brought the total toll to nearly 270,000 further deaths. Faced with this misery layered atop military defeat, Louis XIV had his own gold plate melted down as early as June-July 1709, inviting the whole court to follow suit, and reduced taxes in the hardest-hit provinces — symbolic gestures that could not, however, suffice to feed an exhausted kingdom.
It was against this backdrop of twofold disaster, military and domestic, that the reign’s diplomatic humiliation reached its conclusion. On 29 May 1709, the forty articles known as the preliminaries of The Hague imposed on France a return to the borders of the Treaty of the Pyrenees and, still more intolerably, demanded in their fourth article that Louis XIV himself undertake, by force of arms if necessary, to drive his own grandson Philip V from the throne of Spain. The king refused this dishonourable clause while accepting the rest of the conditions, causing the negotiation to fail. Resolved to make his subjects understand that the prolongation of the war no longer depended on his will but on the bad faith of the Allies, he had published on 12 June 1709 a letter addressed directly to the nation through the governors and intendants of the provinces — a gesture unprecedented since Henri IV, marking, more than any military defeat, the lowest point reached by royal authority since the beginning of the personal reign.
XVIII. 1709-1712: Malplaquet, the Dynastic Hecatomb and the Rally at Denain
The failure of the negotiations at The Hague forced the kingdom to continue a war it could no longer finance, but which its army had not yet lost. On 11 September 1709, at Malplaquet, Marshal Villars pitted 65,000 Frenchmen against 75,000 Allies commanded by Marlborough and Prince Eugene — nearly 190,000 combatants in total, in what remains the bloodiest battle of the entire reign. At his side was Marshal Boufflers, though older and of higher rank than him, who had voluntarily placed himself under his command out of pure patriotism; when Villars was wounded in the knee in the thick of the battle and had to be evacuated, it was Boufflers who took over and led the French army’s retreat in good order, without rout. The French had to yield the field, but at the price of an unprecedented casualty ratio: 11,000 killed or wounded and only 500 prisoners in their ranks, against 21,000 allied losses, a quarter of the forces the coalition had committed. What resembled a defeat on the battlefield proved, on the scale of the war, a strategic victory: the allied army, bled white, had to abandon for many months any idea of invading the kingdom.
The Battle of Malplaquet, 11 September 1709: After Jan van Huchtenburgh, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
This military respite coincided, however, with an unprecedented dynastic collapse in the history of the reign. On 14 April 1711, Monseigneur, the Grand Dauphin, Louis XIV’s only son, died of smallpox at 49, leaving his own son, the Duke of Bourgogne, to succeed him as dauphin. This succession in turn proved tragic: on 12 February 1712, the Duchess of Bourgogne, Marie-Adélaïde of Savoy, died of measles, followed six days later, on 18 February, by her husband the Duke of Bourgogne himself, carried off by the same epidemic. Their eldest son, the Duke of Bretagne, in turn succumbed on 8 March 1712; only the younger son survived, the Duke of Anjou, then barely two years old, saved by his governess Madame de Ventadour, who firmly resisted the doctors wishing to bleed him as they had the rest of his family, keeping him warm until his recovery. Once dauphin, the child ascended the throne three years later under the name Louis XV. In less than a year, three generations of direct heirs had disappeared, and the dynasty’s survival now hung on this single child, plunging the monarchy into a succession crisis that neither Malplaquet nor any military victory could dispel.
It was against this backdrop of mourning that the most unexpected rally of the entire war occurred. At the start of the summer of 1712, the kingdom appeared on the brink of collapse: after taking Le Quesnoy on 4 July, Prince Eugene, at the head of 135,000 imperial and Dutch troops, opened on 17 July the siege of Landrecies, the last stronghold before the road to Paris, facing Villars’s 70,000 men. The latter feigned an attack on the besiegers of Landrecies the better to divert attention, then had his troops cross the Escaut and seized by surprise, on 24 July 1712, the entrenched camp of Denain, cutting Prince Eugene off from his supply depots established at Marchiennes. Deprived of provisions, Eugene had to lift the siege of Landrecies as early as 2 August and retreat toward Mons. This unhoped-for victory, which saved France from an invasion that had seemed inevitable only days before, at once reversed the diplomatic balance of power and hastened the opening of the negotiations that were to lead to the treaties of Utrecht and Rastatt.
The Battle of Denain, 24 July 1712: Raymond Monvoisin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
XIX. 1713-1715: Utrecht, Rastatt and the Death of the Sun King
The rally at Denain finally bore fruit on the diplomatic front. After fourteen months of negotiations, Louis XIV signed on 11 April 1713 at Utrecht separate treaties with England, the United Provinces, Savoy, Portugal and Prussia — the first great treaty drafted in French since Henri II, which inaugurated the diplomatic primacy of that language until the Treaty of Versailles of 1919. Toward the United Provinces, France restored Tournai, Menin, Ypres and Furnes in exchange for Lille, Aire, Béthune and Saint-Venant, the Spanish Netherlands being ceded on a transitional basis; toward Savoy, Duke Victor Amadeus II recovered Nice and Savoy, lost during the war, ceded the Barcelonnette valley, and received in addition from Philip V Sicily with the title of king. Toward England, finally, Louis XIV ceded the island of Saint-Christophe, Hudson Bay, Acadia, Newfoundland and the islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon. The clause most heavily laden with dynastic consequences, however, concerned Spain: Philip V was recognised there as king by all the signatories, on the sole condition of renouncing, for himself and his descendants, all rights to the crown of France — a mirror clause to the one Charles II had attempted to impose in 1700, which at last durably separated the two crowns.
Commemorative Print of the Treaty of Utrecht, 1713: Abraham Allard, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Emperor Charles VI, the only major belligerent not to have signed at Utrecht, continued the war alone for several more months, until Villars and Prince Eugene of Savoy negotiated directly, as equals between former adversaries, the Treaty of Rastatt, signed on 6 March 1714: France restored Breisach, Freiburg and Kehl there, the reign’s last Rhenish conquests. On 7 September 1714, the Treaty of Baden extended these clauses to all the principalities of the Holy Roman Empire, thus closing the last front that had remained open since 1701 and putting a final end to thirteen years of continuous war.
Peace scarcely restored on every front, the king himself declined rapidly. A pain in his leg, which appeared in the summer of 1715, degenerated into gangrene that progressively blackened the limb, bringing on an agony of nearly three weeks. On 26 August 1715, Louis XIV told his closest courtiers: “I am going, gentlemen, but the State will always remain” — a formula that summed up, better than any treaty, the conception he had always held of the monarchy. His very last recorded words, spoken around eleven o’clock at night on 31 August, were: “O my God, come to my aid, hasten to help me.” He died the next day, 1 September 1715, at Versailles, four days before his seventy-seventh birthday, leaving as his only direct heir his five-year-old great-grandson, the future Louis XV. That same month of July 1714, fearing the extinction of his legitimate line, Louis XIV had taken care to draw up a will entrusting his nephew Philippe d’Orléans with the presidency of a mere council of regency, while having registered by the Parlement, on 2 August following, an edict calling his two legitimised sons, the Duke of Maine and the Count of Toulouse, to the succession of the crown should all the princes of the blood disappear — a device that placed the Duke of Maine, the young king’s designated guardian, in a position to control the regency without bearing its title. The day after the king’s death, on 2 September, the regent had this will annulled by the Parlement of Paris, thereby recovering the full powers that the succession edict had sought to strip from him; in exchange, he restored on 15 September the right of remonstrance that Louis XIV had abolished at the start of his personal reign — a sign, within the very first days that followed his death, that the absolutist edifice built over fifty-four years of personal rule would not survive intact its founder.
Portrait of Louis XIV in Coronation Robes: Hyacinthe Rigaud, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
🔍 Zoom – The Historiographical Legacy of Louis XIV: Three Centuries of Judgment
🧠 Key Takeaways
- The regency of Anne of Austria and the ministry of Mazarin (1643-1661) brought the Thirty Years’ War to a close at Rocroi and Westphalia, but had to weather five years of the Fronde which nearly toppled the crown before the young Louis XIV came of age.
- On Mazarin’s death in 1661, Louis XIV chose to govern alone, without a chief minister: the fall of Fouquet and the rise of Colbert inaugurated half a century of absolutist centralisation, underpinned by Colbertist economics and the construction of Versailles.
- The Peace of Nijmegen (1678-1679) marked the territorial and diplomatic peak of the reign, earning Louis XIV the title of “Louis the Great,” before the policy of the reunions and the dragonnades worsened France’s isolation in Europe.
- The revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 provoked the exodus of about 200,000 Huguenots and reopened, with the League of Augsburg, an almost uninterrupted cycle of wars lasting until the end of the reign.
- The War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714) plunged the kingdom into its harshest ordeal: the annus horribilis of 1702-1707 (Höchstädt, Ramillies, Turin), then the great winter of 1709, before the unhoped-for rally at Denain in 1712 saved France from invasion.
- The dynastic hecatomb of 1711-1712 swept away, in less than a year, the Grand Dauphin, the Duke and Duchess of Bourgogne and their eldest son, leaving only the future Louis XV, then aged two, to survive.
- The treaties of Utrecht, Rastatt and Baden (1713-1714) closed thirteen years of war by recognising Philip V as King of Spain, on condition that he forever renounce the crown of France.
- Louis XIV died at Versailles on 1 September 1715 after seventy-two years of reign, the longest in French history; the very next day, the regent Philippe d’Orléans had his will annulled, a sign that the absolutism he had built would not survive him intact.