ABSTRACT
In the first of a series of Memoirs written for the Dauphin, Louis XIV declared in 1661 that ‘disorder reigned everywhere’ in the realm he was about to govern personally, having assumed the reins of power after the death of Cardinal Mazarin.1 This was a typically grandiose exaggeration, but the king sought nothing less than unequivocal obedience from his subjects, and the Reformation and Counter-Reformation had spawned many sects within the French church that he was determined to eradicate, as he made clear in the same set of Memoirs.2 With a firm belief in ‘one faith, one king, one law’, Louis was also bound by tradition and duty. The king of France was the ‘Eldest Son of the Church’ and ‘The Most Christian King’, honorary titles that the Papacy had bestowed on Louis XIV’s predecessors in acknowledgement of their long-standing service and loyalty to Catholicism. Coronation oaths also obliged the king to uphold the privileges of the church and preserve the Catholic faith, to give peace, justice and mercy to his people, and ‘to eliminate totally from his dominions the heresies condemned by the church’. In this sense Louis failed miserably. His attempt to quell the first Jansenist crisis that erupted in the 1650s, and create an enduring ‘peace in the church’ in 1669 only lasted a decade. From 1679 belligerent methods were employed to enhance the temporal power of the Sun King and extend his spiritual authority within France and over recently annexed and ‘reunited’ territories, culminating in the revocation of the edict of Nantes that terminated toleration for the Protestant Huguenots in 1685. From this point on, the manner in which the history of the reign unfolded was palpably different from the two periods that preceded it, thanks to recent excesses and long-standing religious problems that had either been ineffectively tackled or simply overlooked. By continuing militantly to persecute minorities, and by employing blunt and simplistic methods to try and resolve complex theological problems, Louis XIV further aggravated tensions and deepened divisions, leaving his religious affairs in turmoil when gangrene finally got the better of him on 1 September 1715.
