Louis XIV and Twenty Million Frenchmen by Pierre Goubert

He patronised science and the arts on an unprecedented scale, and, as Burke drily remarks, left the recipients ‘in no doubt of what was expected from them in return’ (he quotes one adviser to the Crown as follows: ‘The King is generous, but he knows what he is doing and he has no wish to appear a fool’). The King sponsored periodicals devoted in large part to his actions, and employed 20 ‘historiographers royal’ to record the events of his reign for posterity. The royal treasury paid for at least three hundred statues and paintings of Louis, and seven hundred engravings. Images of the King were commissioned, Burke recounts, in paint, bronze, stone, tapestry, pastel, enamel, wood, terracotta and wax. The efforts of Louis XIV, which Peter Burke chronicles in his new book, were truly staggering, even by the standards of Early Modern monarchy. Both nations do a much better job of idolising their great writers.įrench leaders, however, have certainly tried far harder than their English counterparts to win lasting admiration. Only the English, perhaps, among Western nations, match the French in this lack of hero-worship (consider the similar fates of Churchill and De Gaulle in the immediate post-war period). Even De Gaulle inspires far more respect than love. The last president or king who still excites unstinting positive emotions is Henri IV, assassinated in 1610.

Which of them enjoys anything like the adoration from their countrymen that Americans give to the secular canon of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt and Kennedy? Napoleon himself is today remembered as a vainglorious tyrant who squandered his achievements. Consider the following list: Richelieu, Louis XIV, Robespierre, Napoleon, Clemenceau, De Gaulle. The French, a people normally not plagued by a lack of national pride, revere very few of their past leaders.

Louis XIV and Twenty Million Frenchmen by Pierre Goubert