Hatton Ragnhild M. Louis XIV and Europe

Ohio State University Press, 1976. — 311 p.This is no where more obvious than in the career of the Sun King (assuming kings can have a career). Louis XIV comes over as a number of models, the authoritarian king, the narcissistic glam-rock king, and a Catholic bogeyman king seeking to impose Catholicism on the free by suppressing minorities. We would not want to go totally revisionist and say these were all wrong, but they are not nuanced. This book, admirably edited by the late Ragnhild Hatton and containing essays by the foremost experts (some of them only previously available in French), is full of nuance. We see Louis's methods in Foreign Policy: did he bribe or did he bully, the answer is yes. Yet he also entertained the belief that the German and Italian states saw France as protector of their liberties (whether they wanted it or not). We view his relationship with his fellow monarchs, many of whom built under inspiration of Versailles. We also encounter his relationship with the German states and the Jacobites. There are case studies on his relationship with the Elector of Mainz, the secret treaty of 1668 with the Emperor, the outbreaks of the Dutch and Nine Years War, Louis's attempt to built a third-party in Germany and the Baltic to counter-balance the Emperor (now flushed with Turkish victories) and the relationship of France with the admirably slippery Savoy's monarch Victor Amadeus II. We end with a note of the players on Louis's team featuring Colbert de Torcy - a descendant of many houses of the noblesse de la robe.