The Age of Louis XIV

Summary

The Age of Louis XIV is the eighth volume of The Story of Civilization and the second to carry Ariel Durant's name on the title page beside her husband's. Published in 1963, it covers Europe from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 to the death of Louis XIV in 1715, and its subtitle names the figures around whom the Durants organize the period: Pascal, Molière, Cromwell, Milton, Peter the Great, Newton and Spinoza. The book opens with France, which the authors treat as the cultural and political center of the age. They follow the young king through the Fronde and the ministry of Mazarin, then describe his personal rule from 1661: Colbert's management of finance, industry and the navy, the building of Versailles and the ritual of the court, and the succession of wars, from the War of Devolution to the War of the Spanish Succession, that enlarged France while exhausting its treasury and people. Religion receives sustained attention. The Durants narrate the Jansenist controversy at Port-Royal, Pascal's Provincial Letters against Jesuit casuistry and his unfinished defense of Christianity, the Quietist dispute in which Bossuet defeated Fénelon, and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, with the dragonnades and the flight of Huguenots that followed. Long chapters on French letters present Corneille's last years, Molière, Racine, La Fontaine, Boileau, La Rochefoucauld, Madame de Sévigné and La Bruyère as the classical summit of French literature. The second movement crosses to England for the Commonwealth and Cromwell, the Restoration, the Great Plague and Fire of London, the reign of Charles II and the revolution of 1688, with portraits of Milton, Bunyan, Dryden and Pepys. The book then surveys the rest of the continent: the Dutch Republic and the murder of the de Witt brothers, Spain's decline under Charles II, the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683, Charles XII of Sweden, and Peter the Great's forced Westernization of Russia. The final books turn to what the Durants call the adventure of science and the advance of philosophy, from Boyle, Huygens, Leeuwenhoek and Newton to Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke and Bayle, and close with the old king's death amid military defeat and debt. Throughout, the authors admire the order and polish of French classicism and the achievements of the new science, while judging Louis's wars and his persecution of Protestants severely. Their sympathy runs toward religious toleration and toward Spinoza's philosophy, and readers should notice that this outlook shapes how they weigh the Jansenists, Bossuet and the Huguenots. Like the other volumes, the book is a popular synthesis built from printed sources and earlier scholarship, written for general readers. It is best used to place the period's primary texts, such as Pascal's Pensées, Molière's comedies, Racine's tragedies, Paradise Lost and the Principia, in their setting before students read those works for themselves.

Plot or Argument

• The young king, the Fronde and Mazarin

  The narrative begins with the civil disturbances of the Fronde (1648-1653) and Mazarin's ministry during Louis's minority, which the Durants present as the source of the king's lasting distrust of Paris and of the great nobles.

• Colbert, Versailles and the wars of glory

  After 1661 Louis governs without a first minister. Colbert reorganizes taxation, manufactures and the fleet; the court settles at Versailles; and four major wars, culminating in the War of the Spanish Succession, extend the frontier at enormous cost.

• Port-Royal, Quietism and the Huguenots

  The religious chapters follow the Jansenists and Pascal, the duel between Bossuet and Fénelon over pure love, and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which the authors treat as the gravest error of the reign.

• The classical age of French letters

  Molière's comedies, Racine's tragedies, La Fontaine's fables, Boileau's criticism, La Rochefoucauld's maxims and the letters of Madame de Sévigné are presented as the literary achievement that made French the language of European culture.

• England from Cromwell to William III

  The Commonwealth, the Restoration and the revolution of 1688 frame chapters on Milton, Bunyan, Dryden, Restoration comedy, Pepys, and the plague and fire of 1665-1666.

• The European periphery

  The Dutch Republic, Habsburg Spain and Austria, the German states after the Thirty Years' War, the Turkish siege of Vienna, Sweden under Charles XII, and Peter the Great's Russia are each given a regional survey.

• Science, philosophy and the old king's death

  Chapters on mathematics, physics, biology and medicine lead to Newton, followed by Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke and Bayle; the volume ends with the defeats, famines and bereavements of Louis's last years and his death in 1715.

Characters

• Will and Ariel Durant, authors and narrators

  Husband-and-wife historians whose urbane, epigrammatic voice admires French classicism and the new science while condemning religious persecution.

• Louis XIV, king of France (1643-1715)

  The Sun King, drawn as a hard-working, majestic and self-regarding ruler whose ambition for glory organizes the whole period.

• Jean-Baptiste Colbert, controller-general of finances

  Louis's tireless administrator of revenue, industry, commerce and the navy.

• Blaise Pascal, mathematician and Christian apologist

  Author of the Provincial Letters and the Pensées, treated with great respect as a mind torn between reason and faith.

• Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet and François Fénelon, bishops and preachers

  The defender of Gallican orthodoxy and the gentle mystic whose dispute over Quietism ended with Fénelon's submission to Rome.

• Molière and Racine, dramatists

  The comic and tragic masters of French classical theater.

• Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England

  Puritan general and ruler of the Commonwealth, presented with mingled admiration and disapproval.

• John Milton, poet and pamphleteer

  Defender of the regicide and author of Paradise Lost, written in blindness after the Restoration.

• Peter the Great, tsar of Russia

  Reformer who imposed Western techniques and customs on Russia by relentless force.

• Isaac Newton, natural philosopher

  Author of the Principia, whose synthesis of mechanics and gravitation crowns the book's account of science.

• Baruch Spinoza, philosopher

  Excommunicated Amsterdam lens grinder whose Ethics the Durants treat with evident affection.

Lessons

• Glory purchased with a kingdom's strength

  The Durants show Louis XIV making France the first power of Europe through administration, art and war, and they show the bill coming due in famine, debt and military defeat by 1709-1715. Students can weigh what kind of greatness the reign achieved and who paid for it, distinguishing the authors' judgment from the evidence they present.

  • Which of Louis's wars do the Durants treat as defensible, and which as vanity?
  • Was Versailles an instrument of good government or a substitute for it?
  • What does the king's deathbed counsel to his heir, as the authors report it, suggest about his own final judgment of his wars?

• Uniformity of faith by royal decree

  The revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and the dragonnades that preceded it receive the authors' strongest condemnation. The episode lets students ask what a Christian ruler owes to subjects who dissent, why many Catholic clergy applauded the revocation at the time, and what the flight of the Huguenots cost France.

  • What reasons did Louis and his advisers give for revoking the edict?
  • How did Huguenot families respond, and what did faithfulness require of them?
  • Can coerced conformity produce genuine belief? Use Pascal or Bossuet to frame your answer.

• Port-Royal and the seriousness of grace

  The Jansenists of Port-Royal, with Pascal as their most brilliant voice, insisted on human helplessness without grace and attacked lax confessional practice. The Durants narrate their persecution and the final destruction of the convent. Students can compare the theological substance of the quarrel with the political reasons the crown and the Jesuits opposed it.

  • What did Pascal ridicule in the Jesuit casuists of the Provincial Letters?
  • Why would an absolute monarchy fear a small community of nuns and scholars?
  • Do the Durants explain Jansenist doctrine fairly, or mainly as a story of persecution?

• The new science and the old faith

  The book presents Newton, Leibniz, Boyle and Locke as founders of a new confidence in reason, and Spinoza and Bayle as its boldest critics of revealed religion. Yet Newton, Boyle and Leibniz were themselves devout. Students should notice how the authors' sympathies shape the story and test it against the scientists' own words.

  • How did Newton understand the relation between his physics and God?
  • Why do the Durants give Spinoza so much space and warmth?
  • Is the period better described as a conflict between science and faith or as a reordering of their relationship?

Context

The volume appeared in 1963, two years after The Age of Reason Begins, as the Durants worked steadily through the early modern centuries for a large American readership built by the Book-of-the-Month Club. Its period, 1648-1715, runs from the settlement of the Wars of Religion to the death of the most powerful monarch of the age, and its approach reflects the mid-century admiration for French classical culture and the liberal confidence in toleration and science.

Composition

Will Durant had planned the series as a single narrative of civilization; by the seventh volume Ariel's research and drafting contributions were acknowledged by joint authorship. The book is assembled from printed memoirs (notably Saint-Simon and Madame de Sévigné), standard French, English and German histories, and the authors' reading of the period's literature and philosophy, not from archival research.

Reception

The book sold widely, as the series did, and was valued by general readers for its portraits of writers and thinkers. Academic historians, then moving toward social and economic history and narrower monographs, treated the series as popular synthesis. Its judgments on Louis XIV follow a long liberal tradition descending from Voltaire's Siècle de Louis XIV, which the Durants openly admired.

Comparisons

• Pensees

  Durant's chapter on Pascal summarizes the wager and the misery-and-grandeur argument; the Pensées themselves let students see how much more fragmentary, urgent and devout Pascal's apology is than any summary can show.

• The Provincial Letters

  The Provincial Letters are the primary document behind the Durants' account of the Jansenist-Jesuit quarrel and show Pascal's comic method of letting casuists condemn themselves in their own words.

• The Misanthrope and Other Plays

  The Durants present Molière as the conscience of the court in comic form; reading The Misanthrope and Tartuffe tests whether his satire of sincerity and religious pretense fits their portrait.

• Phaedra

  Phèdre (1677) is the tragedy the book treats as Racine's summit before his withdrawal from the stage; its Jansenist-tinged sense of passion and grace connects the literary and religious chapters.

• Paradise Lost

  The English chapters place Milton's epic in the aftermath of the Restoration, published by a blind republican whose cause had failed; the poem shows a theology and an ambition far larger than the political context Durant supplies.

• Principia

  Newton's Principia (1687) is the climax of the volume's account of science, and its General Scholium, added in 1713, complicates any reading of the new physics as hostile to belief in God.

• Ethics

  The Durants give Spinoza a long, admiring chapter; the Ethics itself, with its geometrical method, lets students judge whether their sympathetic paraphrase captures his argument about God and nature.

• The Age of Voltaire

  The following volume begins in 1715 with the Regency and carries the critique of Louis XIV's absolutism and religious policy into the Enlightenment.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The Fronde in the opening chapters. Notice how the authors use the boy-king's humiliation in Paris to explain his later move to Versailles and his control of the nobility.
• The chapters on Port-Royal and Pascal. Track what the Jansenists actually taught about grace and why both Jesuits and crown treated them as dangerous.
• The revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Note the steps that led to it, the dragonnades, and the numbers of refugees the Durants report, and ask where those estimates come from.
• The literary portraits of Molière and Racine. Watch how often the authors connect a play to the court or to the author's private life, and judge whether the connection holds.
• Newton and Spinoza near the end. Compare the tone the authors use for each with the tone they use for Bossuet.

Key terms and names

Fronde

The series of revolts by the Parlement of Paris and great nobles against royal government during Louis XIV's minority, 1648-1653.

Absolutism

The theory and practice of monarchy in which the king governs without a binding check from estates or courts, while still bound in principle by divine and fundamental law.

Jansenism

A Catholic movement following Cornelius Jansen's reading of Augustine on grace, centered at the convent of Port-Royal and defended by Antoine Arnauld and Pascal.

Edict of Nantes

Henry IV's grant of 1598 allowing French Protestants limited freedom of worship; Louis XIV revoked it by the Edict of Fontainebleau in 1685.

Dragonnades

The quartering of dragoons in Huguenot households to pressure families into conversion, used in the years before and after the revocation.

Quietism

A teaching of passive, disinterested love of God associated with Madame Guyon and defended by Fénelon; Rome condemned propositions from Fénelon's book in 1699.

Glorious Revolution

The replacement of James II by William III and Mary II in 1688-1689, which the Durants connect to Locke's political writings and to William's long war against Louis.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What years does the volume cover, and what events mark its beginning and end?
2. Comprehension What reforms did Colbert attempt in French finance, manufacturing and the navy?
3. Comprehension Who quarreled over Quietism, and how was the quarrel settled?
4. Interpretation Why do the Durants treat France as the center of the age while devoting long sections to England, Holland and Russia?
5. Interpretation How do the authors explain the fact that the most polished literature in French history flourished under a king they judge so harshly?
6. Interpretation What makes Spinoza attractive to the Durants, and what objections might Pascal or Bossuet raise to his philosophy?
7. Big Question Louis XIV wanted one king, one law and one faith. When is unity in a nation a good to be pursued, and when does its pursuit become a wrong against conscience?

Faith Connections

• Daniel 4:28-37 (Scripture)

  Nebuchadnezzar's boast over the great Babylon he built and his humbling until he acknowledged the Most High offer a frame for reading the Sun King's Versailles and the reverses of his last years, without claiming the authors read them that way.

• Acts 5:27-32 (Scripture)

  Peter's answer that he must obey God rather than men stands behind both the Huguenots who refused conversion and the nuns of Port-Royal who refused to sign the formulary, and helps students judge the claims of conscience in each case.

• Pascal, Pensées (the wager and the 'thinking reed') (Great Conversation)

  The Durants summarize Pascal as a genius divided between science and faith; reading his fragments on human misery and grandeur lets students hear his own case for why reason points beyond itself.

• Bossuet, Politics Drawn from the Very Words of Holy Scripture (Great Conversation)

  Bossuet's defense of divine-right monarchy from Scripture is the theological argument behind the regime the Durants describe; students can test whether his biblical reasoning supports the king's actual conduct.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Between 1648 and 1715 France under Louis XIV became the model of European government, manners and letters; centralized monarchy produced order, magnificence and a classical literature of lasting value; but the king's pursuit of glory through war, and of religious uniformity through the revocation, exhausted France and drove out productive subjects; meanwhile in England, Holland and the republic of letters, a new science and philosophy grew that would undermine the authority on which the age was built.

Rhetorical device: ironic juxtaposition. The authors set the splendor of Versailles beside the famine years of the 1690s and the refugees of 1685, letting the contrast carry their judgment of the reign rather than stating it outright.

Debate: Resolved: The cultural achievements of Louis XIV's France justify the Durants' calling the period by his name.

Writing Prompts

Essay: The Durants present the revocation of the Edict of Nantes as the worst decision of Louis XIV's reign. Using their account and at least one primary source, argue whether that judgment is sound and on what grounds.

Comparison with Pensees: Compare the Durants' summary of Pascal with three fragments of the Pensées on human misery and greatness, and argue what the summary preserves and what it loses.

Medical Lens

The volume is not a medical history, but its chapters on science survey seventeenth-century medicine as part of the scientific advance: microscopy in Leeuwenhoek and Malpighi, the clinical observation of Thomas Sydenham, and the continuing hold of bleeding and purging on court physicians. The English chapters include the Great Plague of London (1665), familiar to readers through Pepys and later Defoe. In France, the famine and cold of 1693-1694 and 1709 appear as consequences of war and harvest failure, and the deaths in the royal family in 1711-1712 are part of the closing narrative. Durant's evaluations of seventeenth-century physicians often echo Molière's satire of doctors, and students should separate that comic tradition from what physicians of the period actually knew and did. Locators below are given by subject rather than page; any medical detail should be checked against the sources the authors cite before citation.

• Chapters on science in the late seventeenth century (biology and medicine)

  Leeuwenhoek's observations of microorganisms, Malpighi's capillaries and microscopic anatomy, and Sydenham's bedside description of diseases.

  Physicians Doctors Anatomy Dissection
• English chapters on the Restoration, 1665-1666

  The Great Plague of London and the Fire of the following year, drawn partly from Pepys's diary.

  Plague Epidemic Death Dying
• Chapters on French society and the last wars of Louis XIV

  Famine and mortality in the 1690s and the great winter of 1709, as the human cost of war finance and failed harvests.

  Starvation Nutrition Death Dying
• Chapters on the king and his court

  Court medicine and the king's own health, including the surgical operation on his fistula in 1686 if the authors report it, and the deaths of his heirs before 1715.

  Surgery Humoral Medicine Death Dying

Creative Prompts

• Dialogue

  Write a conversation in 1685 between a Huguenot merchant of La Rochelle preparing to flee to Holland and his Catholic neighbor who has just heard the revocation proclaimed.

• Essay

  The Durants admire French classical literature and condemn the king who patronized it. Argue whether the art of Molière and Racine depended on the absolutism the authors criticize.

• Classroom

  Make a map of Europe in 1715 marking each region the book surveys, and annotate it with one writer, one scientist and one ruler the Durants associate with that place.

• Fiction

  Narrate a single day at Versailles in 1682 from the point of view of a servant who must be ready for the king's rising, drawing on the court ritual the book describes.

Further Reading

• The Age of Louis XIV (Le Siècle de Louis XIV), Voltaire

  Voltaire's 1751 history, the model and ancestor of the Durants' cultural approach.

• Memoirs, Duc de Saint-Simon

• Letters, Madame de Sévigné

• Louis XIV, John B. Wolf

• Louis XIV and Twenty Million Frenchmen, Pierre Goubert

• The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Samuel Pepys