Louis Xiv.makers of History Series

John S. C. Abbott's 19th-century biography captures a monarch unlike any other: Louis XIV, the Sun King, who ruled France for seventy-two years, the longest reign in recorded history. Abbott presents Louis not merely as a sovereign but as a man shaped by the treacherous currents of court life, from his troubled childhood amid the political turmoil surrounding his father's marriage to Anne of Austria, through his education under the cunning Cardinal Mazarin, to the moment he seized power and declared himself the state. The narrative illuminates how Louis transformed a fractured kingdom into thepreeminent power of Europe, compelling restless nobles to dwell beneath his gilded roof at Versailles and crushing the rebellious sentiments that had plagued his minority. Abbott delves into the private man beneath the public spectacle: the familial tensions, the religious convictions that led him to revoke the Edict of Nantes and drive thousands of Huguenots from France, and the relentless wars that defined his decades of personal rule. This volume from the Makers of History Series offers a Victorian perspective on the architect of absolute monarchy, rendering the seventeenth century's most commanding figure with narrative immediacy and intimate detail.