Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe by Leslie Carroll Page A
Authors: Leslie Carroll
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kingdom against what they viewed asthe arbitrariness and oppressiveness of the monarchy. The nobility, long exempt from paying taxes, rebelled against Mazarin’s attempts to tax them. The second wave, the Fronde des Princes (1650–1653), was instigated by the nobility and led by the king’s own uncle, the duc d’Orléans. They claimed to be acting in the boy-king’s interests, insisting that the regents were ruining the realm. The rebellion gradually fizzled and died, their cause mooted when Louis came of age and was crowned.
In 1661, Cardinal Mazarin passed away and Louis XIV assumed the reins of his own reign. France had been at war on several fronts, and the king harnessed his subjects’ desire for peace by consolidating power in the hands of the monarch at the expense of the aristocracy.
When Louis took control of his kingdom, the treasury was on the verge of bankruptcy and his first challenge became fiscal reform. When he chose his ministers, he chose well. Over the course of his spectacularly long reign, under his aegis they also instituted military reforms and modernized the army. The Grand Ordonnance de Procédure Civile of 1667, also known as the Code Louis, reformed the kingdom’s legal system by unifying the two disparate sets of laws that had been used for centuries depending on whether one lived in the north or the south of the kingdom. The Code Louis became the basis for the Napoleonic Code.
The Sun King brought street lighting and a police force to Paris. He built Les Invalides, then and now a veterans’ hospital. He also renovated the Louvre, which, after he officially moved the court to Versailles in 1682, was given over to the public. In 1686, at the instigation of one of his most influential mistresses, Madame de Maintenon (to whom Louis was by then secretly married), he founded the Institut de Saint-Cyr, an academy for impoverished aristocratic girls. Saint-Cyr was the only school for girls in France that was not a convent.
Louis’ belief in the divine right of kings led him to turn the monarchy into a centralized state, reducing the power and authority of the feudal nobility. To that end, one of his greatest achievements—politically, socially, and aesthetically—was the transformation of Versailles from a modestly sized hunting lodge into the greatest andmost glamorous palace and surrounding landscape in Europe. He developed a rigid system of court etiquette that brought the once feudal (and feuding) aristocrats under his roof and under his thumb, turning them into courtiers, glorified servants who vied for royal preferment and fought over perquisites of rank and the right to perform such menial tasks as handing His Majesty his nightshirt. Having to spend so much time at Versailles prevented the nobles from staying too long at their country estates, where they might conceivably consolidate their feudal power bases and foment rebellion. Manners were ritualistically prescribed, even down to the way one walked, requested admission to a room (you didn’t knock, but scratched with your pinkie nail on the wood), or applied your rouge.
The French court became the envy of Europe for its manners and sophistication, and Versailles was its showplace, representing the power and majesty of the monarchy.
In 1660, Louis had married the Infanta of Spain, Maria Theresa, the eldest daughter of King Philip IV. Their marriage was part of the 1659 Treaty of the Pyrenees, which ended a war between France and Spain, and they were first cousins on both sides (which may have been one reason that most of their children died young). A loophole in their marriage contract ended up leaving the door open years later for French Bourbon succession in the queen’s homeland so that their grandson ended up on the Spanish throne as Philip V.
Louis and Marie-Thérèse (as the queen was known in France) had six children, but only one survived to adulthood, Louis the Grand Dauphin, known as Monseigneur. However, the king
In 1661, Cardinal Mazarin passed away and Louis XIV assumed the reins of his own reign. France had been at war on several fronts, and the king harnessed his subjects’ desire for peace by consolidating power in the hands of the monarch at the expense of the aristocracy.
When Louis took control of his kingdom, the treasury was on the verge of bankruptcy and his first challenge became fiscal reform. When he chose his ministers, he chose well. Over the course of his spectacularly long reign, under his aegis they also instituted military reforms and modernized the army. The Grand Ordonnance de Procédure Civile of 1667, also known as the Code Louis, reformed the kingdom’s legal system by unifying the two disparate sets of laws that had been used for centuries depending on whether one lived in the north or the south of the kingdom. The Code Louis became the basis for the Napoleonic Code.
The Sun King brought street lighting and a police force to Paris. He built Les Invalides, then and now a veterans’ hospital. He also renovated the Louvre, which, after he officially moved the court to Versailles in 1682, was given over to the public. In 1686, at the instigation of one of his most influential mistresses, Madame de Maintenon (to whom Louis was by then secretly married), he founded the Institut de Saint-Cyr, an academy for impoverished aristocratic girls. Saint-Cyr was the only school for girls in France that was not a convent.
Louis’ belief in the divine right of kings led him to turn the monarchy into a centralized state, reducing the power and authority of the feudal nobility. To that end, one of his greatest achievements—politically, socially, and aesthetically—was the transformation of Versailles from a modestly sized hunting lodge into the greatest andmost glamorous palace and surrounding landscape in Europe. He developed a rigid system of court etiquette that brought the once feudal (and feuding) aristocrats under his roof and under his thumb, turning them into courtiers, glorified servants who vied for royal preferment and fought over perquisites of rank and the right to perform such menial tasks as handing His Majesty his nightshirt. Having to spend so much time at Versailles prevented the nobles from staying too long at their country estates, where they might conceivably consolidate their feudal power bases and foment rebellion. Manners were ritualistically prescribed, even down to the way one walked, requested admission to a room (you didn’t knock, but scratched with your pinkie nail on the wood), or applied your rouge.
The French court became the envy of Europe for its manners and sophistication, and Versailles was its showplace, representing the power and majesty of the monarchy.
In 1660, Louis had married the Infanta of Spain, Maria Theresa, the eldest daughter of King Philip IV. Their marriage was part of the 1659 Treaty of the Pyrenees, which ended a war between France and Spain, and they were first cousins on both sides (which may have been one reason that most of their children died young). A loophole in their marriage contract ended up leaving the door open years later for French Bourbon succession in the queen’s homeland so that their grandson ended up on the Spanish throne as Philip V.
Louis and Marie-Thérèse (as the queen was known in France) had six children, but only one survived to adulthood, Louis the Grand Dauphin, known as Monseigneur. However, the king
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