ABSTRACT
These two witnesses were testifying to the sad plight of Louis XIV’s kingdom during his last quarter century on the throne. Punctuated by military defeats, deadly famines and financial turmoil, the Sun King’s third reign saw the gravest crisis France was to face between the long struggle against the Habsburgs of the middle of the seventeenth century and the revolution of 1789. Beset by countless troubles, the French monarchy became an état extraordinaire of short-term expedients and desperate improvisations.3 Nowhere was this change in government more keenly felt than in the provinces, where elites found themselves dealing with a harsher royal regime that sought to achieve its goals with little regard for their interests. No longer were they ‘basking in the sun’ of the heyday of the reign.4
