The purpose of this research is to examine Louis XIV of France as portrayed through the eyes of Saint-Simon and Voltaire. The plan of the research will be to set forth a summary of the biography of Louis XVI, and then to compare and contrast the interpretations of Saint-Simon and Voltaire, with a view toward determining which portrait of the king appears to be the more convincing and accurate.
In their discussions of Louis XIV (1643-1715), both Saint-Simon and Voltaire seek to show the king as having been mentored by Cardinal Mazarin, Richelieu's successor, in a way that pointed toward the continuation of France's dominant power position in Europe. By making the court at Versailles the center of important state and social activity and by engaging in a series of continental wars culminating in the War of the Spanish succession, Louis consolidated his personal rule and the concept of absolute monarchy. He appointed persons from the bourgeois of middle classes to significant government positions, while keeping the military occupied at wars away from court and keeping the nobility very much at court and so increasingly subservient to royal command.
Saint-Simon's treatment of Louis XIV is on the whole negative and hostile, although he does grudgingly acknowledge Louis's intelligence, insofar as it served the king to achieve highly personal goals or to manipulate situations for his personal benefit. He attributes many of the faults of Louis's reign and manner to the mean-spiritedness of those who were his closest advisors and who exercised undue and unfortunate influence on him during the period of his regency: "He was . . . deliberately repressed by a mother who loved to govern, and still more so by a wicked and self-interested minister [Cardinal Mazarin], who risked the State a thousand times for his own aggrandisement." Saint-Simon's thesis is that impact of such influences was felt, first, on the manner of Louis's development as a ...