Before there was Elvis in Hawaii there was Louis XIV, par la grâce de Dieu, Roi de France et de Navarre, who ruled in fancy dress for an astonishing 72 years.

Louie waged wars, made a footstool of France, bankrupted the treasury, trashed the Edict of Nantes, and popularized big hair.

Today in history, September 1, 1715, Louis-Dieudonné -- premier fils de France et dauphin de Viennois, comte de Barcelona, duc de Luxembourg, Louis le Grand, Le Roi Soleil -- took a gangrenous turn for the worse.

The Duc de Saint-Simon offered this assessment:

"There was nothing he liked so much as flattery, or, to put it more plainly, adulation; the coarser and clumsier it was, the more he relished it … His vanity, which was perpetually nourished -- for even preachers used to praise him to his face from the pulpit -- was the cause of the aggrandisement of his Ministers."

It is this grotesque vanity -- Louie's greatest and only perduring bequeathment -- that so richly informs the national character of France to this very day.

UPDATE: Sharing his mortality anniversary with Louie is the writer François Mauriac, who was elected to the Académie Française in 1933, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1952, and was awarded the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor in 1958. The pity is he is not much read in France today. We recommend Le Noeud de vipères (1932). It is good to remember that there are some good things from France.

Damian,

In Texspeak your fine and erudite post translates to:
France, nation of vain butt-kissers.
With the occassional maverick that escapes from the herd.

This recent Terror in Russia is going to pull the Ruskies closer to us. Or maybe not. We definitely have some common problems.

However in the event that we are blessed with four more years of President Bush, and our removal of American forces from Germany, what will be the next move by France?

Since France is the center of an amalgam of little countries called the EU, shouldn't the UN security council veto be inherited by the Union?\\\\\

You know I just read through that edict of nantes clap trap.
So what your saying is this King basicly tossed all the Jews out of France with the stroke of a pen.

Unless I'm misinterpreting something.

Frenchmen wouldn't have been involved with the Church of England. Charles Martel drove out the Muslims before they ever got a foot hold. The King made Roman Catholic the only acceptable religion.
Was he refering to Martin Luther's splinter Protestants when he said "...and it is our pleasure, that all the temples of those of the said R.P.R. situate in our kingdom, countries, territories, and the lordships under our crown, shall be demolished without delay."?

Kings suc

PT,

The Edict of Nantes (1598) was an important development in European political thought -- a declaration of tolerance legally recognizing, for the first time, freedom of conscience and voiding the principle "cuius regio eius religio". Practically, the Edict restored peace to the kingdom of France after the internecine "Wars of Religion".

R.P.R. was the Catholic nickname (scil., la religion prétendue réformée = the so-called reformed church) for the Reformed Church in France. The National Synod was the R.P.R.'s ecclesiastical council.

Louie in revoking the "perpetual and irrevocable" Edict did violence not only to its specific provisions but to the establishing concept of religious freedom.

I imagine Louie considered anything non-Catholic fair game.

And, yes. Kings leave much to be desired in governance.

DGB