ABSTRACT
Le Grand Conde was unique in seventeenth-century France in so far as he was the only subject of Louis XIV who, at every stage of his adult life, was accorded iconic status by a substantial part of the population. The outstanding military successes that established Conde's first iconic persona in the 1640s must be set against the conjunction of a number of key ideological factors. The seven years of Conde's rebellion in exile were the natural response of his aristocratic pride to the moral defeat he suffered when du cardinal Mazarin resumed full authority, but it is evident he came to realize there was no future in opposition. Conde's significance in the context was that, thanks to the wide-ranging but totally unpedantic interest he had always had in literature, philosophy, history, art and religion, he could move effortlessly from the sublimity of military heroism to the sublimity of taste.
