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Updated: May 22, 2025
He employed a carefully reorganized army and the skill of his generals in a series of inexcusable attacks on his neighbors, in which he finally squandered all that Colbert's economies had accumulated and led France to the edge of financial ruin. Louis XIV's predecessors had had, on the whole, little time to think of conquest.
Grotius' War and Peace was followed, in Louis XIV's time, by Pufendorf's On the Law of Nature and Nations . While the rules laid down by these and later writers on international law have by no means put an end to war, they have prevented many conflicts by settling certain questions and by increasing the ways in which nations may come to an understanding with one another through their ambassadors without recourse to arms.
Time has had revenge upon the Grand Monarch and the usurping tyrant, yet their names must be upon the roll of heroes, since they played a mighty part in the events that make history and cannot suffer oblivion though they have ceased to tower above the subjects they despised. Louis XIV's personality needs the mantle of magnificence which fell from France after the predominance of years.
He observed all the usual duties of his daily life and affected a serenity that other men might envy when they bewailed the passing of the Old Order, or repeated the prophecy once made by an astrologer that the end of Louis XIV's reign should not be glorious as the beginning.
His Causeries du Lundi short critical papers originally contributed to a periodical magazine and subsequently published in a long series of volumes together with his Port Royal an elaborate account of the movements in letters and philosophy during the earlier years of Louis XIV's reign contain a mass of material of unequalled value concerning the whole of French literature.
We need but recall the names of the writers and thinkers who arose during Louis XIV's reign, and shed their seminal ideas broadcast upon the air, to realize how full a period it was, both of birth and decay; of the passing away of the old and the uprising of the new forms of thought.
Nothing but special conditions in the politics both of Europe and of France can explain this singular importance and prominence of Louis XIV's reign. And we find that both France and Europe were indeed in an exceptional position when he ascended the throne.
Colbert, Louis XIV's minister, had greatly developed French commerce, navy, and navigation; and the Mississippi Company was an important factor in French history early in the eighteenth century. This design, if successful, would have neutralized the advantage England had secured in the possession of the Atlantic seaboard of North America, and have made the vast West a heritage of France.
During the dragonnades in Languedoc, Louis XIV's Irish brigade joined eagerly in the butchery of old men, women and children and the burning of whole villages. The same heroes distinguished themselves by destroying everything they could find in remote Alpine valleys so that the unfortunate Waldenses might die of starvation.
There he found his daughter, Madame d'Urban, who did all she could to induce him to stay with her; but to do so would have been to flout Louis XIV's orders too publicly, and the marquis was afraid to remain so much in evidence lest evil should befall him; he accordingly retired to the little village of l'Isle, built in a charming spot near the fountain of Vaucluse; there he was lost sight of; none ever heard him spoken of again, and when I myself travelled in the south of France in 1835, I sought in vain any trace of the obscure and forgotten death which closed so turbulent and stormy an existence.
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