Louis XIV of France The purpose of this rese

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-

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Saint-Simon cites the failure of Louis to set priorities. He says that Louis focused on details of design or politesse at Versailles, which in any case Saint-Simon sees as a failure of design and execution, while ignoring the larger questions of policy, and by depreciating or limiting the opportunity of the aristocracy to serve either king or country. Louis's attention to courtly behavior, in other words, does not excuse his failure of attention to those in France most suited to rule; that is in the background of Saint-Simon's criticism that under Louis "all natural distinctions [undoubtedly of birth] were obliterated." Voltaire's perspective of Louis XIV is far more friendly toward the king. In one sense, it has the advantage of hindsight, for Voltaire was born more than 50 years after Louis. Like Saint-Simon, Voltaire cites Louis's extravagant court, but his interpretation differs from that of Saint-Simon in that he sees the resplendence of Versailles as a symbol of France's superior position in Europe. Whereas Saint-Simon seems on the verge of disgust at every single little detail of self-absorption and aggrandizement on the part of the king, Voltaire asserts a universal absorption in matters of court: "Men would rather know w
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Approximate Word count = 2052
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)