How Louis XIV Made France the Model of Europe and Bankrupted It

The idea

The exam's first band asks how absolutism worked, and France is its case because France did it first and most completely. The change began before Louis. Richelieu, chief minister from sixteen twenty-eight, sent intendants into the provinces, non-noble officials answerable to Paris, abolished half the regional assemblies that approved taxes, and nearly tripled the taille. He backed Protestants and Ottomans against the Habsburgs because the state's interest outranked the church's, the practice historians call reason of state. Mazarin continued him, and the Fronde, the nobles' and parlements' revolt of sixteen forty-eight to fifty-three, failed and, the witness says, only strengthened the monarchy. Louis took personal power in sixteen sixty-one and built the rest. Versailles gathered the nobles under his eye, ranked them by ritual, and made every favor depend on court standing, so that the men who had fought the crown in the Fronde now competed to hand the king his shirt. Colbert doubled revenue without new taxes by cutting the collectors' share and built manufactures, tariffs and a merchant marine. Academies, a dictionary and a court culture made French the language of Europe's diplomacy and aristocracy. Behind the show stood the numbers the anchor gives: governments four hundred percent larger across the century, armies from twenty thousand to one hundred fifty thousand, professional and uniformed. That is why Europe copied France, and unit 03 shows Prussia, Austria and Russia copying it. The same reign shows the cost. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes in sixteen eighty-five drove out a productive Protestant minority, above two hundred thousand by the anchor's count, and strengthened his enemies. Thirty-five years of war against the Habsburgs won small border territories, drew England, the Netherlands and Austria into alliance against him, and ended at Utrecht in seventeen thirteen with Louis's grandson on Spain's throne and France exhausted. Versailles itself took sixty percent of revenue at the height of construction. To pay, Louis sold titles and offices, invented taxes and pressed the peasants harder, and at his death in seventeen fifteen the state was technically bankrupt. The anchor's judgment is that his practical policies were largely destructive, and the course voices that as the anchor's. The record supports both halves: a state stronger, more centralized and more admired than any in Europe, and a treasury that could not carry it.