Louis XIV

This book offers a complete and profoundly human portrait of Louis XIV of France, the celebrated Sun King, from his childhood marked by the Fronde to his final days dominated by illness, mourning, and concern for the future of his kingdom. Through this second installment, the reader traverses the construction of absolute power, the birth of Versailles as a political stage, the wars that led France to glory and exhaustion, the intimate life of the monarch with his family and his lovers, the cultural brilliance of the seventeenth century, and the religious decisions that left a legacy of intolerance and exile.