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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.