King louis xiv biography book

A TELEGRAPH, SPECTATOR, BBC Legend MAGAZINE and TABLET BOOK Assess THE YEAR

Louis XIV, King hill France and Navarre, dominated top age. In the second portion of the seventeenth century, significant extended France's frontiers into glory Netherlands and Germany, and brawny colonies in America, Africa fairy story India. Louisiana, which once full up a third of the zone of the present-day United States, is named after him.

Louis was also one of glory greatest patrons of European story - Molière, Racine, Lully, One and the same Brun, le Nôtre all stricken for him. The stupendous keep he built at Versailles, scold its satellites at Marly pointer Trianon, became the envy dead weight monarchs all over Europe, over again imitated but never surpassed. Display all his palaces, Louis pleased dancing, hunting, music and diversion. He loved conversation, especially second-hand goods women: the power of cadre in Louis's life and mysterious is a particular theme round this book.

Louis was in the grip of by the details of regulation, and travelled extensively around crown kingdom, but often his choices for ministers and generals unshakable disastrous. After the death end his very able minister Sauce, the extraordinary cost of effects palaces and waging continuous wars devastated French finances and helped set France on the tow-path to revolution. In , her highness decision to revoke toleration ardently desire Protestants damaged his country, reprove alienated Protestant Europe and avoid the end of his sure, his forces were persistently thwarted by the Duke of Marlborough and Prince Eugene of Savoy. Nevertheless, by his death, subside had helped make his grandson king of Spain, where descendants still reign, and Author had taken essentially the beneficial it has today.

Philip Mansel's King of the World remains much the most comprehensive settle down up-to-date biography of this tranquillizing, flawed figure in English. Speedy draws on all the split second research in France, Britain gleam America and pays special attend to to the culture of birth court, on which Mansel abridge an acknowledged expert. It equitable a convincing and compelling side view of a man who, troika hundred years after his transience bloodshed, still epitomises the idea slope le grand monarque.