ABSTRACT
On the levels of both foreign and domestic policy, the wars of Louis XIV were ordeals of the highest order for his opponents. Its central argument is that the multifarious pressures unleashed by Louis's wars induced late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Europeans to articulate language that contributed in unintentional yet important ways to emergent understandings of what Europe itself was and how its various parts should relate to one another. This sense of European identity was constructed in relation to warfare in general and to Louis's wars in particular. Scholars have long pointed to the wars of Louis XIV as a turning point in the long history of Western balance-of-power discourse. Claydon has written of the widespread belief during the wars of Louis XIV in the inherently anti-Christian nature of universal monarchy, and the moral and spiritual moorings upon which the balance of power thinking consequently rested.
