Kings, queens, and emperors come and go, or used to anyway, in the good old bad old days, and the modern potentates who have left a lasting mark on the popular imagination are few. Henry VIII and Elizabeth I of England, Frederick the Great of Prussia, Peter the Great of Russia, Napoleon and Louis XIV (1638-1715) of France—these are pretty much the only such royals whose names, at least, are familiar to the passably educated. (Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette constitute a category all their own, innocent of any serious accomplishment and known principally for crass repulsiveness and getting what they deserved.)
To good democrats born and bred, even the most flourishing kingship is morally dubious at best, and the greatest and most glorious rulers are remembered as much for gross failings—their vanity, their ostentation, their profligate spending or profligate sexuality, their indifference to all suffering but their own—as for heroic accomplishments. Three hundred years after Louis XIV’s death, then, it is fitting to recall the Sun King who presided over one of the supremely efflorescent epochs in the history of civilization, as well as the tyrant who thrust Europe into horrific war to avenge pinprick affronts to his amour-propre, fired religious persecution to rampaging frenzy, and most notoriously proclaimed himself to be France’s sole and unrivaled Power: “L’État, c’est moi” ranks high in the annals of imperious arrogance.
Of the very greatest of the great, only Napoleon and Louis XIV have earned comparison to the most masterful emperors of the classical world. Napoleon was, of course, the Julius Caesar cum Alexander of modern times, the incomparable self-crowned usurper of imperial power, conqueror of the better part of the known world, winner of all available honor and glory. Louis, for his part, excelled in nearly all trademark aspects of kingliness.
Lord Macaulay hailed his surpassing virtue in both the arts of war and those of peace: Peerless in the necessary barbarity of the battlefield and the exquisite refinement of the salon, Louis’s France enjoyed “over the surrounding countries at once the ascendancy which Rome had over Greece and the ascendancy which Greece had over Rome.” Winston Churchill, in Marlborough: His Life and Times (1933-38), the biography of the author’s most distinguished ancestor (and Louis’s military nemesis), attributes every conceivable superiority, “not only military and economic, but religious, moral, and intellectual,” to the French nation that pursued and nearly acquired mastery of the entire continent: “It was the most magnificent claim to world dominion ever made since the age of the Antonines.”
Great kings win fame by winning wars. Louis XIV came up a loser in the end—the Duke of Marlborough and Prince Eugene of Savoy outmaneuvered the finest French generals—but he prosecuted his everlasting wars with such audacious ambition that he is remembered for military address approaching genius, pitting Roman Catholic France against the massed forces of Protestant Europe, including England, Holland, Prussia, and Sweden. But great kings bring notoriety and shame upon themselves by conducting wars with particular savagery: After the atrocities that attended the destruction of Heidelberg, Macaulay writes in his History of England, Louis’s name reeked of opprobrium everywhere outside France:
Louis XIV’s reign is most celebated, however, not for the king’s own achievements but for the masterworks produced during his tenure by French poets, playwrights, architects, painters, philosophers, and theologians. Louis gave his name to their genius and made his name thereby. In his Age of Louis XIV, Voltaire composes an encomium to the cultural excellence that thrived in ancient Greece and Rome, in Renaissance Florence under the Medici, and in Louis XIV’s France, and of the latter he declares his intention to depict “not the actions of a single man, but the spirit of men in the most enlightened age the world has ever seen.”
The palace and grounds at Versailles are a lasting monument not only to colossal egotism but to great-souled ambition at its worldly best. The pervasive martial spiritedness of the king and his court colored the preoccupations of the great tragedians Corneille and Racine: Their obsessive themes were honor and glory, as they considered these words from every angle and sought to divine their true meaning. Beauties abounded; intellectual grace proliferated like miraculous loaves and fishes. As Voltaire exults, “There will never again be such an era in which a Duke de la Rochefoucauld, the author of the Maxims, after discoursing with a Pascal and an Arnauld, goes to the theatre to witness a play of Corneille.” However, the king and his courtiers did not always appreciate the offerings with which great artists presented them. The artists knew to tread carefully. Jules Michelet, who devotes two volumes of his immense History of France to Louis’s reign, worries ferociously about the telling case of Molière’s Don Juan: “The court, unlike Molière himself, admired Don Juan, found him the perfect gentleman. He lies, he cheats, drives those who love him to despair.” The aristocratic audience failed to embrace the play: “The public was ice.”
Yet offensive as Molière’s Don Juan was, he was not nearly as offensive as he ought to have been. Molière, whose day job was to serve as Louis’s valet de chambre, could not bring himself to make Don Juan as loathsome as he knew him to be: “Here is what Molière’s Don Juan lacks in order to be true and historic: baseness, cowardice.” To violate the court’s sense of honor, to make the king and his men recognize themselves in the vile reprobate—for Louis was a hound, and so were the boys, and everybody knew it—was more than Molière could ever dare.
It would be left to Mozart to portray the charming seducer, rapist, and murderer in the fullness of his corruption.
Michelet’s is the disenchanted republican view of aristocratic moral rot. Voltaire’s history is far more admiring of Louis than Michelet’s, but there are limits to Voltaire’s admiration. Indeed, Voltaire discerns Louis’s superior in a political figure of scant consequence: Duke Leopold of Lorraine. The inconsequence is essential to the effect.
So Voltaire announces that it was not the Sun King ablaze with glory who best served his people. But best to say it softly: Voltaire buries these two brief paragraphs of praise for Leopold discreetly in the depths of his very long history, and it is easy to skip over the passage in haste. Yet the upshot is momentous: In most respects, Leopold cannot bear comparison with Louis; but in the crucial respect, Leopold deserves the supreme honor and glory, for performing the sacred duties of rule with true love for his countrymen.
For there is glory and there is glory—and none better to drive the lesson home, in another key altogether from Voltaire’s, than Bishop Bossuet, Louis’s most prized holy man, and a master of eloquence, who made the funeral oration for court dignitaries a form of art. In one of his most famous orations, Bossuet seizes the occasion of the sudden death of the young and beautiful Duchess of Orleans (the sister of England’s Charles II and the wife of Louis’s brother) and plows under every last vestige of worldly grandeur: “Greatness and glory! Can we still hear these words in the triumph of death? No, gentlemen, I can no longer endure these great words.”
The most exalted grandees must acknowledge their nothingness; only then will they comprehend where genuine glory lies. Everything under the sun is vanity, all earthly glory is vainglory, so that one must aspire to the perfection of eternal life, where he will enjoy “the consummate light of glory”—God’s glory that makes the Sun King’s effulgence a paltry thing.
How seriously did Louis XIV take such soulful aspersions on his magnificence? He never wearied of being superb. Death took him just like the rest, but as gangrene gnawed him away from the leg up, he maintained his fearless air, and even his majesty. To his wife, or maybe to a pair of lackeys, he remarked, “Why do you weep—did you imagine I was immortal?” And: “I had always heard that it is difficult to die, but I find it so easy.” The Sun King submitted to death’s dominion, and did so with unfailing courage that honored life itself. Bright glory remained even as the darkness consumed him.
Algis Valiunas is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
