ABSTRACT
To celebrate France’s victories over the Dutch in the 1670s the court painter Lebrun had painted nine scenes for the grande galerie in Versailles, including one with Louis sitting in a chariot holding a thunderbolt, accompanied across the Rhine by Minerva, Hercules and personifications of Glory and Victory. In political terms, France had taken a very different road from that followed by England after the mid-seventeenth century European crises. In England, the Glorious Revolution of the 1680s had confirmed the transition from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy, a transition that had begun in earnest with the Civil War of the 1640s. French absolutism was the product of historic collisions and compromises, of military conquests, dynastic marriages, religious warfare and political and social conflict. The last decade of Louis XIV’s reign had been one of the most miserable in French history, the result of seemingly endless warfare and atrocious weather.
