Few kings of France faced a more daunting prospect than Henri Bourbon in 1589. France was decades into the Wars of Religion, a conflict between Catholic and Protestant factions that had torn the country apart and drained the Crown of much power and prestige. His predecessor Henri III had been the first French king to be murdered by his own subject. The Bourbon Dynasty replaced the Valois atop the throne amidst this bleakest of backdrops. Over the next 200 years, they would take the French kingship to unknown heights of power, prestige, and opulence. Yet this came at a sensational cost — for the Bourbons became the victims of the most famous revolution in world history.
Healing the Realm
Henri IV was, by blood, the legitimate heir to the French throne after the death of Henri III. Yet his claim posed grave problems to the unity of the realm. Henri was a Calvinist Protestant, and as king of Navarre, his power base was firmly in the south of the country, an area that, by 1589, was acting as a Protestant polity almost totally independent from the north. The Catholic League—an association of powerful and radical Catholic interests that dominated much of France—had made it an expressed purpose to remove Henri of Navarre from his position as heir to the throne.
Yet Henri was not a confessional hardliner — he had moved between adherence to Protestantism and Catholicism in his life as his surroundings changed. What remained constant was his commitment to his destiny to unite and rule France. He wanted an end to religious extremism and the damage it had done to the realm, and a restoration of monarchic authority.
In trying to gather support for his accession, the protestant Henri was asking his subjects to choose between the traditional laws of inheritance that governed the throne and the divine order that supported that throne. He was helped by the pressure France faced from Catholic Spain, and he presented himself as a national champion against the Catholic universalists of the Catholic League.
In 1593, Henri made the momentous decision to convert to the Catholic faith. By doing so he was able to show the monarch as a protector of the realm, as an individual willing and able to transcend religious divides in order to do what was best to defend the kingdom. This was a different monarch from the pre-Reformation model, whose unquestioned defense of the Catholic faith was never thought to come second to his duties to the realm. Within a year after his conversion, most resistance to Henri’s rule had faded and he was able to enter Paris in 1594 to hear mass in Notre Dame Cathedral — and begin his quest to unite a shattered kingdom.
Henri first eliminated the last vestiges of opposition by declaring war on Spain and Spain’s allies — which included the Catholic League. The future of his reign, and indeed of the French kingdom, would depend however on his handling of the Protestant problem.
In 1598, Henri put forward the Edict of Nantes, which sought to bring peace to the country by affirming Catholicism as the state religion whilst allowing religious freedom for Protestants, as well as affirming their hold of numerous fortresses. Henri allowed regional Parlements the freedom to enact the edict, though he brought royal pressure to bear on those who were hesitant. His appeal sought to emphasize loyalty to France and to the French Crown as superseding religious attachments. In doing so he made the Crown into a secular guardian of the realm, whose authority derived from its relationship to France rather than to God.
Monarch of the People
Following the acceptance of the edict, the King and his chief minister Sully set about rebuilding the state. Reforms to offices and taxation replenished the state treasury and restored order and efficiency to the workings of the Crown authority. A new breed of bureaucratic nobility evolved to hold offices of the state and provide stability to the government. These “nobles of the robe” would remain vital allies of the monarchy for centuries.
Henri IV was a monarch of the people — and his down-to-earth manner and accessible court made him widely popular. His kingship was not one surrounded by a sacred aura like the medieval monarchs. Yet this was ultimately his downfall. Though popular with a great many of his subjects, the person of the monarch was newly vulnerable, as the fate of Henri III had demonstrated. It was May 1610 on a busy afternoon in Paris when the king’s carriage was caught in traffic in a street. A lone Catholic extremist named Francois Ravaillac, seemingly acting alone, murdered the king in his carriage.
Despite his ignominious end, Henri IV was a momentous monarch, whose reign saved the French monarchy, state, and nation from the disaster that had engulfed it for decades. In so doing he reshaped the role of the Crown and the concept of France itself — creating a vision of a secular state to which loyalty was owed above and beyond all religious affiliation. Henri was in many ways a very modern ruler. Yet the peeling away of the sacred mystique that had for so long protected the kings of France was causing serious problems. Two successive occupants of the throne of Saint Louis had been murdered by their own Catholic subjects.
Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu
The murder of Henri IV led to the formation of another regency headed by another Medici — Marie, the mother of the young king Louis XIII. This regency was unpopular and dominated by Marie’s Italian allies. In 1617, Louis forcefully entered his majority by dismissing the regency council.
The commencement of his reign successfully established the line of Bourbon as the legitimate successors to the Capetians and Valois. However, he was forced to begin his reign by waging a successful campaign against a rebellion raised by his own discontented mother, and then in 1622, he put down a Huguenot rebellion in southern France.
Louis’s reign was dominated by a man whom he admitted to his council in 1624 — Armand-Jean du Plessis, more commonly known as Cardinal Richelieu. Louis and Richelieu shared a belief that loyalty to a religious confession must be subordinated to the interests of the French state. This was a deeply disputed concept at the time, yet it would prove vital to France’s conduct in the titanic struggle of the Thirty Years’ War and to the way in which royal power was concentrated and expressed.
Louis and Richelieu saw the Habsburg rulers of Spain and central Europe, though they were Catholic, as posing a strategic threat to French security through their ability to surround the realm on three sides. It was their belief that France’s position in Europe would become less secure should the Catholic Habsburgs crush their Protestant opponents in Germany and the Low Countries.
The idea that the king’s public duty as a defender of the country should come before his personal aura as a defender of the faith was novel in France, in that it foregrounded the political responsibilities of the Crown over the personal authority of the king himself. Indeed, the very prominence of Richelieu in Louis’s reign demonstrates the extent to which the Crown as an office and a bureaucratic entity was replacing the personal mystique of medieval kingship.
From 1635 France was deeply involved in the Thirty Years’ War, and the royal administration gradually developed in reach and complexity to harvest the necessary taxation. This bureaucracy was staffed by the aforementioned “nobles of the robe.” These men were to a great extent creatures of the Crown and loyal to it. But their influence perturbed the traditional “nobles of the sword,” the upper nobility whose vocation was as warriors rather than administrators, and helped generate alienation from the Crown on their part. This was heightened by Louis’s abolition of traditional martial offices held by the high nobility — that of constable and admiral. Louis embodied a traditional French monarch in one respect, however, he was the last French king to regularly lead his soldiers into battle and to campaign alongside them.
Upon the deaths of Richelieu in 1642 and his monarch a year later, France was seeing increasing success against the armies of Spain. Ultimately the intervention in the Thirty Years’ War would see the French Crown begin to emerge ahead of the Habsburg monarchies in Austria and Spain as the premier power on the continent. Whilst the Spanish king and Holy Roman Emperor battled to maintain their rule over unwieldy empires with very little unity, the French king was presiding over a realm that was increasingly coherent and state-like.
Regency and Rebellion
Louis XIII’s wife Anne of Austria had to endure over 20 years of failed pregnancies before giving birth to a son and heir in 1638. This young Louis was just four years old when his father died, and thus a regency council was instituted. Yet if there is one consistency in the history of France’s monarchy, it is that regency councils bred instability and conflict among the high nobility. The young Louis would grow to dominate his nobility, his realm, and indeed the European continent. Yet the Crown had another storm of noble strife to weather first.
Trouble began with conflict between the regency government of Anne of Austria and her first minister Cardinal Mazarin and the Parlement of Paris, the highest judicial body of senior nobles. The latter would not challenge the authority of an anointed monarch but strenuously resisted what it saw as a tyrannical government led by the foreign Mazarin.
No sooner had the revolt of the Parlement been quelled than the regency faced a revolt by the most senior of France’s high nobility, including the Crown’s foremost military leaders Louis of Condé and the Viscount Turenne. Factionalism prevented this revolt from posing a mortal danger to the regency, though the nobles were only pacified by the accession of Louis XIV to his majority in 1651.
These revolts—known as the Fronde—were deeply formative for Louis XIV and his reign was in many ways characterized as a response to the challenges laid down by these rebellions. The core of this challenge was the question of whether a bureaucratic state presided over by an impersonal Crown and operated by nobles of the robe and a chief minister was to well and truly replace the medieval model of kingship, in which personal ties of family and tradition underpinned the realm.
Louis XIV’s audacity was to accept the former and yet avoid the diminution in the personal aura of the king that it implied. He would elevate administrative nobles to expand the tentacles of the state, yet forgo a chief minister and instead recapture the medieval aura of the Crown through the spectacular glorification of his person.
Rise of the Sun King
Louis’s most important minister for the first half of his long reign was Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who oversaw the Crown’s finances whilst also taking responsibility for buildings, arts, and academies. Louis and Colbert oversaw a flourishing of the arts, with painters, architects, playwrights, and craftspeople taking their fields to new heights — and all this was channeled into the service of glorifying the monarch.
The Crown walked a fine line in ensuring that artistic creativity was bent towards exalting the image of the monarch, yet not instituting so severe a censorship regime that such creativity was muffled altogether.
By far the most famous artistic legacy of Louis XIV’s reign was the Palace of Versailles. This is due not only to its incredible scale and magnificence — but also because the project itself was steeped in ideological significance. The palace was initially a modest hunting lodge, yet in this boggy marshland, Louis XIV demonstrated his triumph over nature itself by overseeing the construction of a vast palace and garden complex which was meticulously ordered. This man-made paradise would be the king’s stage, upon which he would dazzle an enormous court with his performance of power and magnificence, and through which he attempted to concentrate all authority in his realm.
While men of the “new nobility” like Colbert governed the realm, Louis embraced the high nobility by giving them exclusive access to senior positions within his household and by placing them at the center of his routine at the Versailles palace (which was completed in 1682).
And yet the sheer scale of the opulence betrays how the nature of the monarch’s power had changed since the High Medieval Period. The aura of the divine that had once clung to the king’s person had not required grandiose surroundings or opulent images to make it manifest. The assassination of his predecessors and the frequent bouts of noble revolt had perhaps created a sense of insecurity in Louis, one that he sought to banish through a manufactured aura in which he cloaked himself.
Louis was determined to pursue an expansionist foreign policy, in pursuit of renown for himself and for his realm. While his immediate predecessors had sought to carve out a concept of the “interests of state” and lead foreign policies divorced from personal and familial interests, Louis XIV took a direct lead on matters of foreign policy. Louis did not dissolve the notion of a French “state” with interests, rather he saw himself as guided ultimately by the interests of the state such that royal and state concerns molded into one in his person.
With the Habsburg powers seemingly in steep decline following the Thirty Years’ War, the first half of the reign saw him lead an aggressive campaign along France’s borders, including invasions of the Spanish Netherlands and the Dutch Republic. By the middle of the 1680s, France had attained a level of power, and fear, on the continent such that the latter half of Louis’s reign would see mighty coalitions formed with the express desire of containing the Sun King.
This near-continuous state of warfare placed an incredible strain on the French treasury. Yet an essential plank of centralized royal power was the entrenchment of noble privilege, and a vital part of this privilege was freedom from royal taxation. Thus the Crown’s tax base was not deep, and the royal treasury existed in a near-perpetual state of financial crisis.
Religion, War, and Decline
Louis’s enormous reign (still the longest in European history) is nearly impossible to summarize without missing some vital developments in the evolution of royal power and prestige. Yet one factor that must not go unmentioned is the 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes when Louis’s desire to reclaim the medieval mystique of the French King crashed into the complex realities of the late 17th century.
Louis (and many of his French contemporaries) never regarded Henri IV’s 1589 edict as anything more than a temporary concession, a regrettable measure implemented by a Crown that was in a place of desperation and weakness. Louis had restored the monarchy to a place of unrivaled ascendancy over the realm. From this position of power, he could set about creating perfect unity, and nothing was more offensive to the Most Christian King’s (a title given to the French monarchy by the Pope in the 15th century) rule than the gaping confessional split in France. The Revocation was met with jubilation by French Catholics, with Louis hailed as “the new Charlemagne.”
However, the persecution of the Huguenots followed by the 1685 revocation of the Nantes Edict would weaken the realm in a number of ways. A disproportionate section of the Huguenot population were skilled laborers, and hundreds of thousands emigrated from France to take their skills to the Protestant enemies of Louis XIV, particularly Holland and England. Many of those who stayed led fierce rebellions in the south of France that placed great strain on an already burdened military.
It was the protestant polities of Holland and England that would lead the coalitions against France that inflicted many defeats on Louis in the latter part of his reign, and at the core of their propaganda was the tyranny that Louis had demonstrated in his treatment of the Huguenots.
The final war of Louis’s reign was a titanic conflict known as the War of the Spanish Succession from 1701-14. It saw an alliance of England, the Netherlands, and the Habsburgs come together to deny Louis’s heir the Spanish throne, fearing as they did a Bourbon ruler of the realm of France and the Spanish Empire combined. The conflict saw the French army suffer heavy defeats in the opening years of the war at the hands of the Duke of Marlborough and Eugene of Savoy, and by the harsh winter of 1709 Louis XIV was considering a humiliating peace. French fortunes revived somewhat after 1709, and the 1715 Treaty of Utrecht confirmed Philip de Bourbon as king of Spain, though it excluded him from ascending to the French throne.
Not only did this war shatter the French king’s aura of invincibility, which had been cultivated since the Thirty Years’ War, but the realm’s finances which had been teetering on the edge of the abyss were by 1715 in a truly desperate state. It was in this year that Louis XIV died. His 72-year reign had seen the French Crown propelled to new heights of power and influence both within and beyond France. Yet in doing so Louis had pushed the realm to its limit, and the monarchy now stood atop an increasingly unstable social, governmental, and financial foundation.
Louis’s system of rule required a monarch of supreme energy, drive, and charisma. To play the role of the universal king at Versailles, to hold the nobility under the king’s aura, and to personally lead and oversee all aspects of rule was no simple task. It was unfortunate for the Crown that Louis’s great-grandson and successor, Louis XV, was not up to this challenge.
Louis XV and the Tarnished Monarchy
The reign began with yet another minority for the five-year-old Louis, guided by his grand uncle Phillipe, Duke of Orleans. However, the latter’s death in 1723 left the 13-year-old Louis dauntingly isolated as he began his personal rule.
Louis’s early reign resembled that of Louis XIV’s minority, in that the government was dominated by a chief minister — in this case, it was the young king’s tutor Cardinal Fleury. Until his death in 1743, Fleury maintained a steady hand on the tiller of government. Louis XV understood that the king’s role was by this time far more about the performance of power than the exercise of it — for the latter was carried out largely by the Crown’s ever-growing bureaucracy.
However, Louis went about his public performance at Versailles in a somewhat grudging manner and without the enthusiasm and dazzle of his predecessor. And where Louis XIV was symbolically without a chief minister and maintained great interest and influence in affairs of state, Louis XV did not. Nor did Louis continue to employ the minor “nobles of the robe” to run the bureaucracy as his Bourbon predecessors had done so effectively. Instead, his reign saw factions dominate, with the nobles in conflict to gain influence over the government.
Louis XV was also notorious for his infidelity. This did not mark a change from his predecessor. What was different however was the extent to which Louis’s mistresses gained prominence at court and came to influence the king and his reign. Madame de Pompadour in particular dominated Versailles from 1745 until her death in 1764, influencing the King’s views and controlling access to the monarch. This did little to endear the Crown to the French people, who were suspicious of the influence wielded by Louis’s mistresses. Following Pompadour’s death, the king became more secretive and secluded — seemingly adrift in a sea of faction and apathy.
Though the court of the French King remained the center of European culture and art, there was an unmistakable decline in the prestige of the Crown throughout the 18th century. Particularly following the Seven Years’ War from 1756 to 1763, after which defeats to Britain left the latter the dominant world colonial power. Social divisions and financial struggles at home were just about manageable for a Crown that retained luster from international successes, but problems at home and defeats at the hands of European neighbors were a toxic combination for the Bourbons.
This was compounded by the fissures that began to emerge between the Crown and the regional Parlements as the nobility became increasingly frustrated by the internal and external problems bearing down on the nation, and their lack of any real say in the government of the realm. As enlightenment ideas of society, nation, and self-determination filtered through the intellectual world of France via philosophes like Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire, the nobles of the Parlements mobilized these ideas to challenge the way that the Crown ruled.
The Twilight of the Monarchy
At the death of Louis XV in 1774 the Crown upheld a fragile facade of glory. The Versailles court and its members maintained a lifestyle of the most extravagant opulence. The French throne remained the most powerful and revered in Europe. Yet France was a country of immense potential that was stifled and frustrated by a social system that was rigid and antiquated.
A century of frequent warfare had left the country financially exhausted and on the verge of bankruptcy. Louis XV had failed to live up to the glory of his absolutist predecessor, yet neither did he make any meaningful attempt to reform the monarchy. Thus the Crown sailed on rudderless — failing to live up to the glories of its past or to make any attempt to embrace the future.
It would have taken a monarch of vision, energy, charisma, and flexibility to bring the realm back to its feet and maintain the monarchy’s vitality. Louis XVI was not this man. Though he was thoughtful and astute, he did not take a strong interest in engaging with the problems faced by the realm and was very much reactive rather than proactive.
The decision of him and his ministers, just two years into his reign in 1776, to lend substantial military and financial support to the American colonists in their fight for independence from Britain was deeply consequential. It caused the Crown to enter a state of indebtedness from which there could be no recovery.
Louis XVI struggled to comprehend the scope of the crisis for some years, but by 1786 it was clear that drastic action would have to be taken. And though Louis XVI was loath to engage with noble assemblies, he had little choice but to appeal to them for support in generating taxation, though he knew this would come at the cost of pressure from the nobles to implement governmental reforms.
In being forced to consult with the noble assemblies to solve its debt crisis, the Crown was effectively lifting the lid on tensions that had been simmering for many decades and now threatened to boil over. Nobles mobilized the language of the philosophers to denounce a system that was ineffective, excluded them from any real influence, and was trying to infringe on the ancient right of the French nobility to be free from taxation.
The Crown was caught in a bind, whereby it had relied for centuries upon the noble estate to uphold the traditional power structures of the realm, but it now found that one of the conditions of this relationship—freedom from direct taxation—was impossible to maintain with the financial demands of a modern state.
The assembly of notables that had gathered to discuss the Crown’s debt crisis in 1787 was thus soon dissolved, with the assembly suggesting that only the formation of an Estates General could resolve the impasse.
Though opinions differ among historians as to when the French Revolution began, from the perspective of the French Crown the convocation of the Estates General in 1789 was truly an event horizon. Once such an assembly was convened the French monarchy could never have escaped immense change, for the initiative was snatched away from the monarch and invested in the representatives of the French people.
The opening of the Estates General on May 5, 1789, would mark the first step toward the seizure of power by the Third Estate of France and the sidelining of the monarchy as the Revolution unfolded. Over the next four years, Louis XVI would be at times paralyzed by fear and indecision, before making a bold attempt to escape the country and join counter-revolutionary forces beyond France’s borders in 1792. This would be a fatal act — for the capture of the royal family and their ignominious return to Paris marked them out as traitors to the Revolution. On January 21, 1793, Louis Capet, formerly Louis XVI of France, was executed by guillotine, after the National Assembly decided upon his death by just a single vote.
What happened to the king during the French Revolution is worthy of a separate article, but what matters here is the extent to which the monarchy’s prestige declined so steeply in the decades and even centuries prior to 1789.
The French monarchy, so draped in spiritual power and legitimacy throughout the Middle Ages, never entirely recovered from the damage done by the French Wars of Religion. Attempts were made by Henri IV to alter the kingship into an impersonal, bureaucratic role, with the interests of the state as its sole concern. But his murder and the long reign of the Sun King saw a grandiose reverence of the king’s image come to the fore, coupled with an absolutist form of government that alienated much of the French nobility. This system just about worked for the remarkable Louis XIV, but neither of his successors could make this system their own, nor did they possess the will to reform the monarchy or the system it upheld in any meaningful way.
Ultimately it was the Crown’s inability to deal with its debt problems that forced it to face the reforming zest of the country it ruled. The fact that the monarch could not raise tax from the noble class meant it could not raise sufficient funds to manage its debts, yet to tax the nobility would have to entail allowing the nobles a greater role in the governance of the realm, and this was a deal that the monarchy was never able, or willing, to make.
