Chap. 21 - Louis XIV

Louis XIV

When Louis XIV came to the throne as a five-year-old boy (actually four years, eight months) on 14 May 1643, the Thirty Years' War was still in progress, and Cardinal Richelieu, the French éminent grise, had died the preceding year. The situation did not look good for France, but the young boy became one of the world's great monarchs and the embodiment of the divine-right, absolute monarch ("L'état, c'est moi"). Louis (5 September 1638-1 September 1715) ruled France for seventy-two years, one of the longest reigns in recorded history, and dominated European cultural and political affairs.
The roi du soleil (sun king) was the son of Louis XIII and Anne of Austria, born at the royal chateau in Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1638. Since his parents had been married for twenty-two years without a child, they called him "Louis the God-Given." When his father died, the regency fell to the hands of the intensely-disliked queen and Cardinal Jules Mazarin.
Mazarin (Giulio Mazarini, 1602-1661) played a role similar to that of Cardinal Richelieu, who had been the chief advisor (sometimes called l'eminent grise) to King Louis XIII. Mazarin, a Sicilian by birth, had studied in Spain and then in Rome before embarking on a career as a captain of an infantry regiment and then later as a diplomat for the pope. While serving in France, he came to the attention of Richelieu and, around 1638, accepted the cardinal's offer to work for France. As regent, although careless about state finances-especially at his profit-and antagonistic towards the nobles, Mazarin did steer France through the torturous problems of war, civil war, the negotiations at Westphalia and internal chaos.
The first major challenge for Mazarin was La Fronde (1648-1653), a confused revolt that included many different groups.

• Nobles
• Parisian bourgeoisie
• The Parlement of Paris

There were a variety of complaints, such as the noble's suspicions of the growing power of the king and the Parisian mob's unrest because of famine, but the key unifying ground of all the discontents was hatred for Mazarin as a foreign intriguer. The Fronde left a deep impression on young Louis, who had to flee Paris on a number of occasions for his safety--In 1651, rebels even entered the king's bedroom; Mazarin had to flee France twice. Louis felt humiliated by the nobles and threatened by Parisians, and he never forgot it.
In order to ratify the peace treaty ending the war that had begun in 1635 between France and Spain, in 1660 Louis XIV married Marie Thérèse of Austria, daughter of the King of Spain-despite his love for Mazarin's niece, Marie Mancini. When Mazarin, his godfather and prime minister, died on 9 March 1661, the 23-year-old king seized the moment and announced that he himself would govern-something that had not happened since the reign of Henry IV. He obtained support from key ministers, such as Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683), the Marquis de Louvois (1639-91), Hugues de Lionne (1611-1671) and Michel Le Tellier (1603-85)--all expert administrators who had been groomed by Mazarin.
Louis was dignified and imposing with charming manners, but he was also hard working, patient and self-disciplined with an iron physical constitution. He maintained a strict routine of official business, every day. Short of height, he was of modest intelligence (not much helped by his upbringing undertaken largely by his servants) and lacking of a sense of humor. Possessed of a colossal pride, he loved grandeur, glory, military reviews and petty details (uniforms, equipment, drill).
Louis was the epitome of the absolute monarch and embodied the idea of divine right monarchy. As God's representative on earth, he felt that he was due respect and that his word was law; he was responsible to God alone. As an absolute monarch, Louis XIV wielded unlimited authority with all decisions made by him; however, it was not despotism nor arbitrary power, as kings still had to justify their actions to churchmen, entrepreneurs and nobles.
Having taken the reigns of government, Louis now had to contend with the nobility, church, bureaucracy and the rest of Europe to achieve his idea of France.
The chief opposition to the central monarchy was the French, feudal nobility. The king continued the process of destroying the nobility as a class by increasing the use of commoners to run the state and by establishing Versailles as a seventeenth-century "Disneyland" to keep the nobility occupied with non-political amusements after the court moved there in 6 May 1682.
To solidify support from the church, Louis acted in a highly favorable manner. In 1685, the L'Edit de Fountainbleau revoked the Edict of Nantes, and Huguenots, forbidden to practice, left France in droves. On one hand, this created religious unity within France and secured the friendship of the church, but, on the other hand, it aroused the implacable hatred of Protestant states and deprived France of some of its most industrious citizens.
To create a more responsive and effective bureaucracy, Louis instituted new administrative methods to strengthen his control.
Weekly ministerial conferences
Continuity in the top four ministries (finance, army, navy, public works), only sixteen ministers in fifty-four years of his personal reign
Ministers chosen by ability not birth
Intendants continued to rule the 36 generalités (provinces)--but they never served where they were born.

Financial reform of taxes
Colbert, as controller general, worked to improve the French economy through a policy called mercantilism--state intervention to create a self-sustaining economy. Colbert used an aggressive tariff policy to manipulate the import of raw materials and the export of manufactured goods to improve the balance of payments. He also fostered domestic trade and industry by improving communications (roads and canals), eliminating internal tolls, expanding the navy, increasing colonial trade through the East India Company and by subsidizing certain industries (tapestries and furniture).
The economic gains wrought by Colbert and the administrative improvements allowed Louis to pursue an activist foreign policy. Over the course of his long reign, the Sun King essentially confronted all of Europe at one time or another over his ambitions to secure the "natural" boundaries (Alps, Pyrenees, Rhine, Atlantic Ocean) of France. At his disposal, Louis had the largest and best standing army of the day (increased from a peacetime force of 20,000 to a wartime machine of 400,000 professionally-organized men).
The War of Devolution (1667-68) was an attempt to gain the Spanish Netherlands (Belgium). Louis had married Marie Thérèse, the daughter of King Philip IV of Spain, and when her brother died, Louis claimed that his wife should inherit the Netherlands, based on the custom of "Devolution" (Property passes to the children of a first marriage in precedence of later marriages). After a brilliant military campaign, Louis had to retreat in the face of English and Dutch pressure--He never forgave the Dutch-and in the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1668), Louis did get part of Belgium, including Charleroi, Tournai and Lille.
The Dutch War, 1672-78, resulted from Louis' irritation with Dutch commercial power, the perceived Dutch treachery in the War of Devolution and Dutch Protestantism. The long war ended with the Treaties of Nijmegen (1678) in which Spain gave France the Franche Comté (the area to the northeast of Switzerland), and France kept the province of Lorraine.
Louis XIV was at his peak. He had defeated a formidable coalition (Spain and the Holy Roman emperor had joined the Dutch against him) and dictated terms to the enemy. He had extended the frontier of France in the north and in the east. His fleet now equaled those of England and Holland.
Meanwhile, great changes had taken place in his private affairs. In 1680 the Marquise de Montespan, who had replaced Mme de La Vallière as Louis's mistress in 1667, was implicated in the Affair of the Poisons, a scandal in which a number of prominent people were accused of sorcery and murder. Fearful for his reputation, the King dismissed Mme de Montespan and imposed piety on his entourage. Although the king openly renounced pleasure, he still found solace in the arms of his newest favorite, the pious Mme de Maintenon, widow of the satirist Paul Scarron and former governess of the king's illegitimate children. In 1682 the court moved to Versailles. The following year, the Queen died, and the Louis secretly married Mme de Maintenon, to whom he remained devoted for the rest of his life.
The War of the League of Augsberg (1688-97) resulted from the formation in 1686 of the League of Augsberg by Emperor Leopold (Holy Roman Empire) with Spain, Sweden and some German princes to resist further French expansion. When in September 1688, Louis invaded the Palatinate on a trumped up claim and occupied Cologne, the English, Dutch and the League united in a grand alliance to resist the French in a war lasting almost nine years. In the Treaty of Ryswick (1697), Louis gave up all lands, including the Palatinate, that he had seized, except Strasbourg, with Lorraine restored to its duke.
This set the stage for the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14). When Charles II, the last Habsburg king of Spain and Louis' brother-in-law, died in 1700, the nearest male heir was Leopold of Austria, who wanted the Spanish throne for his son the Archduke Charles. Having foreseen the forthcoming conflict over succession to the Spanish throne, European diplomats had earlier worked out an agreement for Prince Joseph of Bavaria, a grandnephew of Leopold, to inherit the throne, but Prince Joseph died in 1699 before Charles II. French diplomats then persuaded Charles II to name a French heir, and a month before his death, Charles II did so, agreeing to leave his undivided lands intact to Philip of Anjou (Philip V), the grandson of Louis XIV. After brief hesitation, Louis accepted on Philip's behalf even though he knew the decision meant war (Louis did not have many options with both England and the Holy Roman Empire already hostile to France.).
A new grand alliance of England, Holland, Savoy, Brandenburg-Prussia, Hannover, the Palatinate, Portugal and the Holy Roman Empire united against France. Although the French army fought bravely, the tide began to turn at Blenheim (13 August 1704) on the Danube River, the first major French defeat in decades. By 1709, France had come perilously close to losing all the advantages gained over the preceding century, but a French victory at the Battle of Denain combined with the Tories coming to power in England led to the end the war. According to the far-reaching treaties of Utrecht, Rastatt, and Baden (1713-14), Philip became king of Spain on the condition that the French and Spanish crowns never unite. France retained its conquests in Flanders and on the Rhine.
The wars had cost France an enormous sum in both financial and human terms. There was bankruptcy, depression, heavy taxation and dissatisfaction. Moreover, a series of deaths in the royal family deprived the king of his son (the Grand Dauphin), two of his grandsons (the Ducs de Bourgogne and Berry), his great grandson (the Duc de Bretagne) and the Duchesse de Bourgogne.
When Louis XIV died in 1715, at the age of seventy-seven, there was great rejoicing in France that he was finally gone. His heir, Louis' great-grandson, was a five-year-old child not expected to live long. Louis had wanted to leave actual power in the hands of the Duc du Maine, his son by Mme de Montespan and had drawn up a will to that effect, but the Parlement of Paris nullified the will after his death, thus setting in motion the course of events that led to the revolution of 1789.
Under Louis XIV, France, had, at a heavy price, become a modern state with an effective armed forces, able bureaucracy and a practical theory of politics. France had added territory and supplanted Spain as the most powerful continental power. In addition, Louis encouraged an extraordinary blossoming of French culture that ensured French cultural predominance for centuries.

Chap. 21 - Molière

Molière

Molière, whose real name was Jean Baptiste Poquelin, composed 12 of the most durable and penetratingly satirical full-length comedies of all time, some in rhyming verse, some in prose, as well as six shorter farces and comedies. As a comic dramatist he ranks with such other distinctive masters of the genre as Aristophanes, Plautus, and George Bernard Shaw. He was also the leading French comic actor, stage director, and dramatic theoretician of the 17th century. In a theatrical period, the early baroque, dominated by the formal neoclassical tragedies of Mairet, Rotrou, du Ryer, Pierre and Thomas Corneille, and Racine, Molière affirmed the potency of comedy as a serious, flexible art form. He also wrote a number of pastorals and other indoor and outdoor divertissements, such as his popular comedy-ballets, that depended on a formidable array of stage machinery (mostly imported from Italy) capable of providing swift and startling changes of sumptuous scenic effects.
He was born on Jan. 15, 1622, to Marie and Jean Poquelin; his father was a Parisian furniture merchant and upholsterer to the king. Jean Baptiste received his early education at the College de Clermont, a Jesuit school, becoming a promising scholar of Latin and Greek. Although he proceeded to study law and was awarded his law degree in 1642, he turned away from both the legal profession and his father's business. Instead, he incorporated (1643) an acting troupe, the Illustre Theatre, in collaboration with the Bejart family, probably because he had fallen in love with their oldest daughter, Madeleine Bejart, who became his mistress. At roughly the same time he also acquired the pseudonym Molière. With this company, Molière played an unsuccessful season in Paris and went bankrupt, then left to tour the provinces, primarily in southern and southwestern France, from about 1646 to 1658. During these 12 years he polished his skills as actor, director, administrator, and playwright. In 1658 the troupe returned to Paris and played before Louis XIV. The king's brother became Molière's patron; later Molière and his colleagues were appointed official providers of entertainment to the Sun King himself.
In the following 24 years, starting with The Precious Maidens Ridiculed (1659), which established him as the most popular comic playwright of the day, and ending with The Imaginary Invalid (1673), Molière advanced from being a gifted adapter of Italian-derived sketches and a showman who put on extravaganzas to a writer whose best plays had the lasting impact of tragedies. Unwittingly, he made many enemies. The clergy mistakenly believed that certain of his plays were attacks on the church. Other playwrights resented his continual experiments with comic forms (as in The School for Wives) and with verse (as in Amphitryon). Famous tragedians such as Montfleury and Hauteroche envied his success with the public and the royal protection he enjoyed. Molière responded by incorporating some of his detractors into his comedies as buffoons and ineffectuals.
In 1662 he married Armande Béjart, a 19-year-old actress who was either Madeleine's sister or (as some of the playwright's rivals claimed) her daughter by Molière. They had one child, Esprit-Madeleine, born in 1665. The marriage led to more than one separation and reconciliation between the playwright and his wife, who was 21 years his junior.
In the late 1660s, Molière developed a lung ailment from which he never recovered, although he continued to write, act, direct, and manage his troupe as energetically as before. He finally collapsed on Feb. 17, 1673, after the fourth performance of The Imaginary Invalid, and died at home that evening. Four days later, on the night of February 21, he was interred in Saint Joseph's Cemetery. Church leaders refused to officiate or to grant his body a formal burial. Seven years later the king united Molière's company with one of its competitors; since that time the French national theater, the Comédie Francaise, has been known as the House of Molière.
The strongest influence on Molière's theater came from the Italian commedia dell'arte troupes -- with their stock characters and situations -- that he encountered during his travels. This influence was enhanced by Molière's sharing of the Théâtre du Petit-Bourbon in Paris with the Italian Players, led by the celebrated Scaramouche. In his longer comedies, Molière immensely refined the commedia themes and techniques, setting most of his plots in and around Paris and raising neoclassical French comedy to a plane of artistry and inventiveness never attained before or since. He applied the alexandrine , or rhymed hexameter line -- borrowed from contemporary tragedies, many of which he had staged -- to a relaxed dialogue that imitated conversational speech. He also created a gallery of incisive portraits: Tartuffe the religious hypocrite, and Orgon, his dupe; Jourdain the social climber; Don Juan the rebel and libertine; cuckolds such as Arnolphe, Dandin, and Amphitryon; Alceste the stony idealist; Harpagon the miser; Scapin the trickster; Argan the hypochondriac; Philaminte the pretentiously cultured lady; and many more.
Molière's principal short plays (in one or two acts) are: The Jealous Husband (1645), The Flying Doctor (1648), Sganarelle (1660), The Rehearsal at Versailles (1663), and The Forced Marriage (1664); the longer plays (in three or five acts) include The School for Husbands (1661), The School for Wives (1662), Tartuffe (1664), Don Juan (1665), The Misanthrope (1666), The Doctor in Spite of Himself (1666), Amphitryon (1668), The Miser (1668), George Dandin (1668), The Bourgeois Gentleman (1670), Scapin (1671), The Learned Ladies (1672), and The Imaginary Invalid (1673).

I present to you

The life of Moliere

Paintings

Leonardo Da Vinci - The last supper

Jacopo Tintoretto - Venice - in the sacristy of the Basilica of Salute - mannerist

Caravaggio - Boy with a basket of fruits, 1593 - Italian baroque

Chap. 20 - Mannerism

The Visual Arts

Mannerism The High Renaissance in Italy coincided with the lives and art of three great artists, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael. Later artists studied and emulated the idealized beauty of Leonardo and Raphael, and the dynamism and grandeur of Michelangelo. However, faced with the perfection of the High Renaissance, a younger generation of painters began to explore different artistic possibilities.
This late period of the Renaissance, which lasted approximately from 1520 to 1600, is called Mannerism from the Italian maniera meaning "style" or "stylishness." To some extent, Mannerism mirrors the religious anxiety and political confusion resulting from the Protestant Reformation and the weakened authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Where High Renaissance art had been concerned with the harmonious balance of naturalism, composition, and color, art now found delight in exaggeration, artificiality, odd perspective, and jarring color.
Although Mannerism began in Florence and Rome by Italian artists, painters from Northern Europe (France, Flanders, and Germany) frequently studied in Italy where they adopted the fashionable Mannerist style. Upon returning to their native countries, they carried this style with them. Prints (such as etchings and engravings) were another important way that the Mannerist style was spread throughout Europe.
The Italian Baroque Italy in the seventeenth century was very different from the unified country we know today. Cities like Florence, Venice, Genoa, Bologna, and Naples formed small individual states with distinct local customs, traditions, dialects, and even artistic traditions. Binding these different cities and their territories together was the Roman Catholic Church, centrally located in Rome at the Vatican and ruled both temporally and spiritually by the Pope.
While most of Northern Europe had been violently affected by the Protestant Reformation, Italy remained staunchly Catholic. Recognizing the need for change and reform, the Catholic Church answered the Protestant Reformation with its own Counter-Reformation. Some Protestant sects protested the use of art in the church setting. The Catholic Church, however, which had been the greatest patron of the arts for centuries, affirmed the importance of the visual arts in propagating personal faith by depicting the lives of Christ and the saints. As a result, artistic commissions for churches and private patrons blossomed in 17th century Italy and nowhere more so than in Rome. Here and throughout Italy, Baroque artists created work that was realistic and yet believably illusionistic, personal, and intensely dramatic.
Seventeenth Century Dutch PaintingHolland (or the Low Lands) had succeeded in breaking away from Catholic Spain’s domination in the late sixteenth century. One important result was that most of Holland embraced Protestantism, and with the exception of a few cities like Utrecht, the effect in Dutch art was the elimination of most religious and mythological themes. Dutch seventeenth century painting tends to be more conservative than that of other European countries, focusing on the land and the pastimes of the Dutch people who were an increasingly prosperous merchant middle class.
Dutch artists depicted their world in direct portraits, realistic still lifes, landscapes, marine scapes, and genre paintings showing scenes of everyday life. However, some Dutch artists like Gerrit van Honthorst and Hendrick Terbrugghen came under the strong influence of the Italian painter Caravaggio. These painters favored dramatic, emotion-filled or colorful subjects and used Caravaggio’s theatrical lighting. Other artists followed the example set by the Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn whose psychological explorations of the human spirit and emotion brought new depths of expression to painting.
Seventeenth Century Flemish PaintingWhile neighboring Holland broke away from the political control of Catholic Spain in the late 16th century, Flanders (Belgium) remained under Spanish domination. Thus, the Catholic Church, which was a significant patron of the arts, continued to influence Flemish art throughout the seventeenth century. Italy also continued to exert its artistic dominance, drawing artists to study the works of its leading painters. One such visitor was Peter Paul Rubens, who traveled to Italy as a young man and was drawn to Caravaggio’s dramatic style and the brilliant colors used by Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese. One his return to Flanders, Rubens synthesized these various artistic traditions, creating an exuberant, dramatic and colorful style that set the tone for all Flemish Baroque painting.
Rubens led a cosmopolitan life and enjoyed phenomenal success, serving among other things as court painter to the Archduke of Austria. His vast output was made possible by a large studio of assistants, many of whom - like Jacob Jordeans and Sir Anthony van Dyck - became famous in their own right. As a result, Rubens' Flemish Baroque style continued to influence the course of art far beyond the borders of Flanders and long after he died in 1640.